Abstract
For commerce (electronic or traditional) to be effective, there must be a degree of trust between buyers and sellers. In traditional commerce, this kind of trust is based on such things as societal laws and customs, and on the intuition people tend to develop about each other during interpersonal interactions. The trustworthiness of these factors is based, to a large extent, on the geographical proximity between buyers and sellers. But this proximity is lost in e-commerce.
In conventional electronic marketplaces the trust among participants is supported by a central server which imposes certain trading rules on all transactions. But such centralized marketplaces have serious drawbacks, among them: lack of scalability, and high cost.
In this paper we propose the concept of Decentralized Electronic Marketplace (DEM) which allow buyers and sellers to engage in commercial transactions, subject to an explicitly stated set of trading rules, called the law of this marketplace-which they can trust to be observed by their trading partners. This trust is due to a decentralized, and thus scalable, mechanism that enforces the stated law of the DEM. We implement an electronic marketplace for airline tickets in order to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed concepts for decentralized and secure electronic marketplace.