Bringing confidence to the Web - combining the power of SET and reputation systems

Reputation systems suffer from easy copying of recommendations and from recommenders attaching themselves to trustworthy recommenders to benefit from their good reputation. Electronic commerce in general, and electronic payment systems in particular, suffer from the uncertainty of potential customers about the reputation of online merchants and the quality of the offered goods or services. We address these issues to a certain degree by creating an originality statement in the payment process that is included in recommendations to prove that a particular recommendation is indeed linked to a real world transaction. We present the initial protocol and two variations and discuss their distinct features. Although the protocol is described working in conjunction with the SET payment scheme, it is easily applicable to other payment systems with the described features.