Supporting Dispute Handling in E-Commerce Transactions, a Framework and Related Methodologies

Abstract

An E-commerce transaction is a means to conduct particular commercial activities using the global digital E-commerce infrastructure. We concentrate here on business to customer (B-to-C) E-commerce transactions. These transactions are based on protocols offered by the global infrastructure, primarily the Internet. Using electronic means to do business can greatly improve the efficiency of the business transactions. It, however, poses some problems that were rarely considered to be important before. One class of problems is caused by the behavior of untrusted participants. For reasons such as dishonesty, disputes may arise. In the general case, when a dispute arises an untrustworthy participant may have an arbitrary behavior, and may or may not cooperate with the dispute handling process. In this paper, we study one class of disputes where the participants have some limited willingness to cooperate, and the causes or demands by the initiators are directly related to the actions in the transactions in which the disputes arise. To this end, we first establish a correctness criterion by extending the existing notion of transactional atomicity to a broader context where the behavior of untrustworthy players is taken into consideration. We then introduce the concept of a dispute, and the difficulties to handle it caused by abnormal behavior of players. We introduce a strategy, benefit set, based on which a solution is built to circumvent that behavior. Due to the special features of E-commerce transactions, we propose a two-tier arbiter structure as the main mechanism in our solution.