A Reputation Mechanism for Virtual Reality - Five-Sense Oriented Feedback Provision and Subjectivity Alignment

In this paper, we propose a reputation mechanism for virtual marketplaces. The proposed approach is based on five-sense oriented feedback provision with the support of existing virtual reality technologies. We have conducted user studies to analyse users' attitude towards this new approach. These studies reveal that users prefer virtual marketplaces with our proposed reputation mechanism over that with traditional reputation mechanisms, and that our mechanism can effectively ensure user's trust in the virtual marketplaces and simultaneously promote user's trust in other users. Our approach is based on feedback from other users. Feedback from users could be very subjective and misleading for other users. Hence, we propose a novel mechanism to align subjective user feedback before reputation computations in virtual marketplaces. Results of our experiment demonstrate that with our feedback alignment approach, buyers can more accurately model sellers' reputation.