Standard economic theory does not capture trust among anonymous Internet traders. But when traders are allowed to have social preferences, uncertainty about a seller's morals opens the door for trust, reward, exploitation and reputation building. We report experiments suggesting that sellers'...

Electronic reputation or "feedback" mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with exchange among strangers by providing the type of information available in more traditional close-knit groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. In this paper,...

Reciprocity in feedback giving distorts the production and content of reputation information in a market, hampering trust and trade efficiency. Guided by feedback patterns observed on eBay and other platforms we run laboratory experiments to investigate how reciprocity can be managed by changes...

We investigate how the introduction of a salient norm for pay differentiation influences wage offers and effort exertion in a gift exchange experiment. Exogenously induced claims indeed lead to substantial differentiation in wages. At the same time, unequal wage schemes do not crowd out effort...

We observe that information externalities arise in sequential equilibrium of the chain store game such that the amount of reputation building among partners differs from that among strangers. No matching effects are predicted for the trust game. Our experiment confirms the qualitative chain...