Paper Info
Title
A game theory-based approach to discourage fake reviews
Abstract
The introduction of a review system in e-commerce platforms results in an effective business model. The effects of positive/negative reviews on the success of a product are well studied in the literature. Therefore, for the vendors, it is crucial to obtain positive reviews of their products. This fact opens fraudulent scenarios. Indeed, some vendors can pay an incentive to the buyers to obtain, in exchange, a fake positive review. This fake-review system (FRS) is so widespread that vendors rely on ad-hoc companies that, through intermediaries, find buyers available to release fake reviews. In this paper, we propose a game-theory-based strategy to discourage the above fraudulent business model, and an effective way to implement this strategy leveraging an Ethereum smart contract. Specifically, the contribution of the paper is two-fold. First, we formalize the current business model as a sequential game, and we identify sufficient conditions making FRS advantageous. Second, we propose to introduce in the review system a new mechanism, thanks to which, the corresponding sequential game requires conditions necessary to make advantageous FRS that are strictly less convenient than the previous ones. We implemented the solution and evaluate the cost of the smart contract execution. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the KES International.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.procs.2021.08.044
KNOWLEDGE-BASED AND INTELLIGENT INFORMATION & ENGINEERING SYSTEMS (KSE 2021)
Keywords
DocType
Volume
E-commerce, Blockchain, E-voting, Sequential Games
Conference
192
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1877-0509
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Vincenzo De Angelis112.06
Francesco Buccafurri299895.97