Factors of trust that influence trust worthiness in peer-to-peer (P2P) based e-commerce

Abstract

Peer-to-Peer Systems are becoming popular. They are widely regarded as the next generation of the Internet. As a result, electronic commerce will be carried out over the peer-to-peer systems in the future rather than in a client-server environment. These Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems suffer from innumerable problems. Trust between two interacting peers involved in an electronic transaction is one of them. In this paper, we propose the factors that can influence the trustworthiness assigned to the trusted peer. Furthermore we catalogue these factors into three classes and discuss the relationship between these factors.