Trusted P2P transactions with fuzzy reputation aggregation

Internet commerce and online commodity exchanges suffer from distrust among sellers and buyers, who are often strangers to each other. The authors present a new P2P reputation system based on fuzzy logic inferences, which can better handle uncertainty, fuzziness, and incomplete information in peer trust reports. This system aggregates peer reputations with affordable message overhead. By testing the system using eBay transaction data in the public domain, the authors seek to demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of two P2P reputation systems - fuzzytrust and eigentrust - at establishing trust among the peers in P2P applications.