Reputation mechanism for e-commerce in virtual reality environments

To clarify, the interest in 3D technology and Virtual Reality (VR) is growing both from academia and industry, promoting the quick development of VMs (e.g., Second Life). Compared with traditional e-marketplaces, VMs have advanced characteristics such as stereoscopic 3D visualization, realtime interactivity, immersion and multisensory feedback [4]. However, there are also inherited trust problems in VMs, e.g., sellers may advertise a perfect deal but do not deliver the promised service or product at the end. A few studies on designing reputation mechanisms for VMs [1] apply traditional reputation mechanisms where only simple numerical ratings, textual descriptions and 2D pictures are considered. They overlook the difference between traditional e-marketplaces and VMs. Besides, the same as traditional e-marketplaces, there are still a lot of subjective ratings existing in the systems because providing feedback based on advanced characteristics of VMs requires a lot of efforts from buyers. Meanwhile, buyers may also lie about experiences with sellers.