Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a well functioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, where transactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach of the legal safeguards...

Online reputation - "feedback" - mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. We...

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'...

We test six hypotheses for contributions in dilemma games, a category that includes the prisoner's dilemma and public goods games. Our experiment focuses specifically on the strategic interdependence of contributing behavior, and manipulates the strategy space of a two-person dilemma game...

In both dictator and impunity games, one player, the dictator, divides a fixed amount of money between himself and one other, the recipient. Recent lab studies of these games have produced seemingly inconsistent results, reporting substantially divergent amounts of dictator giving. Also, one...

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,...