Design and analysis of electronic feedback mechanisms

With the advent and development of modern information technology, such as the Internet, the difficulty in transmitting data has been reduced significantly. This makes it easier for entities to share their experience to a larger extent than before. In this thesis, we study the design and analysis of feedback mechanisms, which are the information systems that enable entities to learn information from others' experience. We provide a framework for feedback mechanisms. We first provide an abstract model of a feedback mechanism which defines the scope of our concept and identifies the necessary components of a feedback mechanism. We then provide a framework for feedback mechanisms. This provides a global and systematic view of feedback mechanisms. We also use our model and framework to decompose and analyse several existing feedback mechanisms. We propose an electronic marketplace which can be used for trading online services such as computational resources and digital storage. This marketplace incorporates a dispute prevention and resolution mechanism that is explicitly designed to encourage the good conduct of marketplace users, as well as providing important security features and being cost-effective. We also show how to incorporate the marketplace into Grid computing for exchanging computational resources. We propose a novel feedback mechanism for electronic marketplaces. In this setting, the role of feedback is no longer a “shadow of the future”, but a “shadow of the present”. In other words, feedback directly impacts on the seller's payoff for the current transaction instead of future transactions. This changes the fundamental functionality of feedback, which solves many inherent problems of reputation systems that are commonly applied in electronic marketplaces. We provide a novel announcement scheme for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) based on a reputation system in order to evaluate message reliability. This scheme features robustness against adversaries, efficiency and fault tolerance to temporary unavailability of the central server.