Supporting Dispute Handling in E-Commerce Transactions, a Framework and Related Methodologies

An E-commerce transaction is a means to conduct particular commercial activities using the global digital E-commerce infrastructure. We concentrate here on business to customer (B-to-C) E-commerce transactions. These transactions are based on protocols offered by the global infrastructure, primarily the Internet. Using electronic means to do business can greatly improve the efficiency of the business transactions. It, however, poses some problems that were rarely considered to be important before. One class of problems is caused by the behavior of untrusted participants. For reasons such as dishonesty, disputes may arise. In the general case, when a dispute arises an untrustworthy participa…