Agent-based system simulation of electronic commerce: Effect of cut-link on prisoner´s dilemma with Small World topology

The increasing popularity of e-commerce demands more research on the trust. This study investigates how the neighbors of the users affect the trust in the e-commerce and empower them to interact with foreign customers. We introduce a social network based model to investigate the evolution of cooperation in the prisoner´s dilemma game. For this study, we implemented an agent-based simulation framework, which models different types of behaviors in online auctions. Agents which represent buyers or sellers are located in the nodes of a small world graph. Each link weight between the agent and its neighbor, symbolize how much it trusts this neighbor. A link with trust inferior to some cut-link threshold will be removed from the graph. We study the effect of the cut-link threshold on the level of cooperation and profit in the e-commerce population. Our results show that the evolved structure of the graph induces a considerable variation in the level of cooperation and profit in the e-commerce system.