Hierarchical Fuzzy Trust Management for Customer-to-Customer in Peer-to-Peer eCommerce

Peer-to-peer (P2P) eCommerce are commonly perceived as an environment offering both opportunities and threats. For peers to be effective they need some mechanism for managing this risk of failure. One way to minimize threats in such an open environment is to exploit reputation to help evaluate the trustworthiness of what and predict the future behaviors of peers. In this study, a set of parameters were identified for describing the trust of a peer and proposes a framework based on a series of underpinning relationships among these factors. In simulation, this trust model has been shown to improve the efficiency of P2P eCommerce system by significantly decreasing the amount of malicious behavior on the network.