Honest Sellers Research Articles

Buying Behavior Patterns Between Traders and Buyers Reviewing From Islamic Business Ethics (Case Study in Wiradesa Market, Pakalongan Regency)

In a market environment, marketing can change and be completely uncertain as well as provide opportunities and threats as well as the emergence of competition. With such high competition, business people use all means to gain profits, even business people often ignore ethics and morals in running a business. The purpose of this research is to find out the pattern of consumer behavior towards the seller, to find out the contracts made in buying and selling transactions and to find out the products being traded are in accordance with sharia principles. This study used qualitative research methods. The results of observations and interviews with traders at the wiradesa market, said that the buying and selling carried out was in accordance with Islamic law and had implemented it, for example, honest sellers in measuring scales, fairness of prices, guaranteed quality of the products being traded and even if there were products that were not good, it would be delivered to the buyer with different price conditions, if the buyer wants to buy then the price will be determined according to the quality of the product.

A New Friedman’s Model for Evolutionary Game Problem

The term game in game theory means a problem, where some of the people or groups (players) share a set of rules and regulations that create the conditions and events that make up the beginning of the game. For instance, in the trade market, the buyers and sellers of some commodities interact in a random way. The reputation of sellers effects on increasing of selling. e.g., honest sellers are more attractive than cheaters for the buyers and the buyers can examine the products or unexamined. In this paper, a non-linear discrete dynamical system of Friedman model was considered. Also, we proposed a new model of interaction between these two populations (buyers and sellers). investigate its limit run behavior where we found the limit converges to a fixed point (0,0) i.e., the sellers will always cheat and the sellers will not examine according to Friedman’s model which is denoted by the fixed point (0.0).

TRIVIA: visualizing reputation profiles to detect malicious sellers in electronic marketplaces

Reputation systems are an essential part of electronic marketplaces that provide a valuable method to identify honest sellers and punish malicious actors. Due to the continuous improvement of the computation models applied, advanced reputation systems have become non-transparent and incomprehensible to the end-user. As a consequence, users become skeptical and lose their trust toward the reputation system. In this work, we are taking a step to increase the transparency of reputation systems by means of providing interactive visual representations of seller reputation profiles. We thereto propose TRIVIA - a visual analytics tool to evaluate seller reputation. Besides enhancing transparency, our results show that through incorporating the visual-cognitive capabilities of a human analyst and the computing power of a machine in TRIVIA, malicious sellers can be reliably identified. In this way we provide a new perspective on how the problem of robustness could be addressed.

Effect of Reputation Mechanisms and Ratings Biases on Traders’ Behavior in Online Marketplaces

Rating mechanisms are becoming an essential tool for online shoppers. There have been many reputation mechanisms proposed in the literature that try to mitigate the sometimes adverse effects of strategic behavior of the traders to alter their true reputation scores. At the same time, several studies have shown the presence of bias (often unintentional) in product ratings and their harmful effect on buyers and product sales. To date, there has not been any work done that studies the effect of reputation mechanisms and ratings biases on the behavior of buyers and sellers in an online marketplace. In this article, we use the concept of replicator dynamics to study the evolution of different types of sellers and buyers who use three different reputation mechanisms. We also study the evolution of different types of sellers in the presence of four types of ratings biases. Our results indicate that, over time, buyers gravitate toward using the adaptive model and, in most scenarios, strategic and dishonest sellers are replaced by honest sellers.

An incentive mechanism designed for e-marketplaces with limited inventory

In electronic marketplaces, reputation systems and incentive mechanisms are prevalently employed to promote the honesty of sellers and buyers. In this article, we focus on the scenario in which the inventory is in short supply, i.e. an e-marketplace with limited inventory (EMLI). The challenges are in twofold: (a) for sellers who aim to maximize their profit, they may intentionally conduct dishonest transactions since the limited products are likely to be sold out regardless of their reputation; (b) for buyers who intend to gain the limited products, they may provide untruthful ratings to mislead other buyers. To address these issues, we propose an incentive mechanism to promote buyer and seller honesty for this type of e-marketplaces. Specifically, the mechanism models the honesty of buyers and sellers as scores and reputation, respectively. It then offers a higher price to the products of more honest sellers (with higher reputation) and allocates the products to more honest buyers (with higher scores). In this way, both sellers and buyers are well encouraged to be honest. Furthermore, we impose proper membership fee on new sellers to cope with the whitewashing attack. We finally theoretically analyze and empirically demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed mechanism and its nice properties.

Health claim regulation of probiotics in the USA and the EU: is there a middle way?

In both the USA and Europe, supermarkets and pharmacies are brimming with probiotics - products containing live micro-organisms claiming they improve health. The availability of these products corresponds to a growing consumer demand for foods that improve or maintain health and wellness. The most persuasive include claims that consumption may confer health benefits. While some of these claims may have merit, others have not been substantiated. For a number of products, claims are based on insufficient research, underpowered studies, or mixed research results, yet individual consumers find that the product is of benefit to them. In attempting to regulate health claims, as distinct from safety, government entities may take positions which represent opposite ends of a philosophical spectrum. On one end of the spectrum they may take a limited approach to regulation relying primarily on the marketplace that respects individual autonomy and assumes a sophisticated consumer and honest sellers; alternatively they may choose substantial regulation based on a belief that consumers need protection from profit-seeking manufacturers. The USA and the European Union have taken two different approaches on this regulatory spectrum.

COMBINING TRUST MODELING AND MECHANISM DESIGN FOR PROMOTING HONESTY IN E‐MARKETPLACES

In this paper, we propose a novel incentive mechanism for promoting honesty in electronic marketplaces that is based on trust modeling. In our mechanism, buyers model other buyers and select the most trustworthy ones as their neighbors to form a social network which can be used to ask advice about sellers. In addition, however, sellers model the reputation of buyers based on the social network. Reputable buyers provide truthful ratings for sellers, and are likely to be neighbors of many other buyers. Sellers will provide more attractive products to reputable buyer to build their own reputation. We theoretically prove that a marketplace operating with our mechanism leads to greater profit both for honest buyers and honest sellers. We emphasize the value of our approach through a series of illustrative examples and in direct contrast to other frameworks for addressing agent trustworthiness. In all, we offer an effective approach for the design of e‐marketplaces that is attractive to users, through its promotion of honesty.

Effects of a reputation feedback system on an online consumer-to-consumer auction market

This research establishes a dynamic game-theoretic model that interprets the mechanism of reputation feedback systems in online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) auction markets. Based on the model, a numerical study is conducted to reveal the effects of feedback systems on auction markets. The study shows that the existence of feedback systems greatly improves the performance of online C2C auction markets: buyers are more willing to trade and gain more benefit from the transactions; sellers' honest behavior is encouraged, as honest sellers' gains are increased and dishonest sellers' gains are reduced. It also offers practical insights on the design of a feedback system: rewarding an honestly-behaving seller is less effective on promoting market performance than punishing a cheating seller.

Deception and price in a market with asymmetric information

AbstractIn markets with asymmetric information, only sellers have knowledge about the quality of goods. Sellers may of course make a declaration of the quality, but unless there are sanctions imposed on false declarations or reputations are at stake, such declarations are tantamount to cheap talk. Nonetheless, in an experimental study we find that most people make honest declarations, which is in line with recent findings that lies damaging another party are costly in terms of the liar's utility. Moreover, we find in this experimental market that deceptive sellers offer lower prices than honest sellers, which could possibly be explained by the same wish to limit the damage to the other party. However, when the recipient of the offer is a social tie we find no evidence for lower prices of deceptive offers, which seems to indicate that the rationale for the lower price in deceptive offers to strangers is in fact profit-seeking (by making the deal more attractive) rather than moral.

PERMANENT EFFECTS OF TEMPORARY FRAUD IN TRANSITION ECONOMIES: THE ROLE OF HONESTY, PRICE, AND LIMITED INFORMATION FLOWS

This paper presents a simple dynamic game in which a population of "cheaters" exerts a negative reputational externality on a population of honest firms. lt is shown how this externality, coupled witli limited information flows amongst buyers, leads to there being "fraud" only in the initial stages of trade. Nevertheless, this temporary fraud can permanently prevent sorne honest sellers from trading with certain buyers. This happens exactly when, in a static setup, "honests" would not have been able to induce separation from "cheaters" by incurring initial losses. Finally, it is shown, in an elementary case, that increasing the number of honest sellers will generally increase welfare, though, in very special cases, it might not.

On being honest and behaving honestly

This paper deals with markets with asymmetric information where transactions are repeated infinitely. It adds to the standard analysis the requirement that the equilibrium be renegotiation proof (RP). We show that when there are just one buyer and one seller there is no price that supports an RP equilibrium. When there are many buyers and sellers the minimum of the price that supports a no cheating RP equilibrium approaches infinity as the probability that an entering firm will find buyers approaches 1. Nonetheless, the market is “saved” if the probability that a particular seller is honest is strictly positive. The core of honest sellers imposes honest behavior on everybody else.