Enhancing the Reputation System in Ridesharing: A Blockchain-Based Mutual Escrow and Cool-Off Period Approach

Traditional and decentralized ride-sharing platforms face significant challenges in ensuring trust between drivers and riders due to rating manipulation and biased reputation systems. Our research addresses these issues by introducing mutual escrow, bidirectional dynamic rating, and a cooldown period to enhance fairness and prevent manipulation. Mutual escrow discourages dishonest feedback by assigning a default rating to users who fail to submit a rating within the specified time frame. Bidirectional dynamic rating adjusts reputation scores based on rating consistency, ensuring a more secure and trustworthy system. A cooldown period delays rating submissions, reducing impulsive or retaliatory feedback. Our system strengthens trust and fairness in decentralized ride-sharing by addressing rating manipulation, biased feedback, and reputation attacks. Unlike traditional single-dimensional systems, our approach dynamically adjusts reputation scores based on historical consistency, reducing the impact of unfair ratings. This research contributes to developing fair and decentralized reputation systems, ensuring trust and transparency in ride-sharing by preventing fake ratings, biased feedback, and reputation fraud. Ultimately, this approach fosters a more secure, transparent, and reliable ride-sharing ecosystem.