To Monitor or not to Monitor - The Role of Trusted Third Parties in Electronic Marketplaces
- Publication Type
- Contribution to conference
- Authors
- Mareike Schoop, Thomas List
- Year of publication
- 2001
- Published in
- Information Age Economy. 5th International Conference Wirtschaftsinformatik
- Editor
- Hans Ulrich Buhl, Andreas Huther, Bernd Reitwiesner
- Pubisher
- Physica-Verlag
- Page (from - to)
- 605-618
- Conference location
- Augsburg, Germany
Electronic marketplaces provide a forum for bringing together sellers and buyers of certain goods or services. Today, a number of commercial marketplaces are in operation. To make a marketplace attractive to potential participants, it must be distinct from its competitors. One way to do so is to provide efficient functionalities complementing the existing support of search, negotiation, and fulfilment. In this paper, the emphasis is on monitoring and tracing functionalities that a marketplace can offer through a trusted third party (TTP) acting as a mediator. The possibility to trace back the reasons for a contract enables the participants to view the history behind an agreement. Monitoring certain phases of the business transaction can prevent a number of problems that can occur in electronic commerce. In this paper we will present different models of TTPs based on the monitoring and tracing facilities and illustrate them using a real-world scenario.