A Structural Fairness Based on Game and Its Application to Analysis of Electronic Commerce Protocols

A structural fairness of electronic commerce protocols is presented. A game-based model of electronic commerce systems is built. And in the model a formalization of fairness is given. They are exactly used to analyze fairness of electronic commerce protocols. Compared with the previous work, the main contributions are the following. Firstly, a strategic game is used to model channels in various qualities and participants´ dishonest behavior enables us to analyze cooperative and adversarial behaviors. Secondly, balance payoff considers both participants´ income and expense but the previous one only considers participants´ income. Thirdly, abortive fairness is defined because of honest participant´s quitting voluntarily or aborting the protocol in response to system failures. These two help us to avoid the confusion that a system satisfies fairness definition but is not fair to some participant factually