A reputation-based approach for consumer protection in Saudi Arabia

Consumer protection is an issue of great importance to Saudi Arabia, leading to the formation of a consumer protection agency as part of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. However, studies have shown that this agency has not ensured adequate protection for consumers. This paper investigates whether better consumer protection may be achieved in Saudi Arabia through the design and implementation of an “independent” quality monitoring system. That is, we propose to develop a system that collects consumers' ratings on the services delivered to them, either physically or electronically, and to then aggregate these ratings over time to establish a useable measure of the reputations of service providers. While certain techniques have been proposed in the literature to calculate reputation, these tend to concentrate on the manipulation of ratings, and do not consider the context within which a rating may be given by a consumer. In other words, these proposed techniques neither consider the subjectivity of consumers' ratings nor the dynamic behaviour of service providers, potentially leading to the allocation of biased or unfair reputation calculations. In order to address this problem, the expectations of consumers have been collected alongside their ratings and then manipulated to distinguish between subjective and unfair ratings to produce a more robust reputation calculations. The proposed approach has been demonstrated using a simple example.