Making Trust Explicit in Distributed Commerce Transactions

In a distributed environment where nodes are independently motivated, many transactions or commercial exchanges may be stymied due to a lack of trust between the participants. The addition of trusted intermediaries may facilitate some exchanges, but others are still problematic. We introduce a language for specifying these commercial exchange problems, and sequencing graphs, a formalism for determining whether a given exchange may occur. We also present an algorithm for generating a feasible execution sequence of pairwise exchanges between parties (when it exists). Indemnities may be offered to facilitatepreviously infeasible transactions. We show when and how they enable commercial transactions.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Steven P. Ketchpel, Hector Garcia-Molina
• Keywords: Commercial Exchange, Commercial Exchange Problems, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Distributed Environment, ICDCS 1996