Incentivizing Honesty in Online Decentralized Markets

The Buyers and Sellers Dilemma is an illustration of the risk that every buyer takes when advancing payment for a product or service in a transaction that cannot be verified beforehand. That is the case of transactions involving a buyer who is physically distant from an unknown or anonymous seller as in online, e-commerce scenarios. To increase gains, the seller may be compelled to act dishonestly and not deliver the goods. It is thus of interest to implement solutions that incentivize honesty in said scenarios. For that, this article carried out a literature review in search of decentralized solutions to encourage honesty in non-verifiable transactions. Based on criteria of decentralization, non authentication and non-verifiable transactions tolerance, the solutions found were classified, analyzed and compared based on data from real world operations extracted from the OpenBazzar platform. We ranked the solutions according to effectiveness, although there is still no comprehensive solution that promotes honest behavior under any circumstances.