Commerce depends on buyers and sellers fulfilling their contractual obligations; mechanisms inducing such performance are essential to well functioning markets. Internet-enabled reputation mechanisms that collect and disseminate consumer feedback have emerged as prominent means for inducing...

Online Reputation Systems are a key, but under-appreciated, component of virtually every social web application. They play an important role in inducing user participation, good behavior and quality contributions. Despite their importance, however, their practical design and implementation has,...

This paper studies settings where a number of sellers of different reputations for honesty simultaneously offer sealed-bid, second-price, single-unit auctions for imperfect substitute goods to unit-demand buyers. Among other applications, these settings can serve as an abstraction of large scale...

This paper introduces a model for analyzing marketplaces, such as eBay, which rely on binary reputation mechanisms for quality signaling and quality control. In our model sellers keep their actual quality private and choose what quality to advertise. The reputation mechanism is primarily used to...

Several properties of online interaction are challenging the accumulated wisdom of trading communities on how to produce and manage trust. Online reputation reporting systems have emerged as a promising trust management mechanism in such settings. The objective of this paper is to contribute to...

Online "feedback mechanisms" - also known as "reputation systems" - have been implemented in the most important private e-markets, such as eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon to foster trust and cooperation among trading partners. In this paper we discuss the main issues relevant for the optimal design of such...

This paper offers a systematic exploration of reputation mechanism design in trading environments with opportunistic sellers, imperfect monitoring of a seller's actions and two possible seller effort levels, one of which has no value to buyers. The objective of reputation mechanisms in such...

Reputation systems are emerging as an increasingly important component of online communities, helping elicit good behavior and cooperation among loosely connected and geographically dispersed economic agents. A deeper understanding of the factors that drive voluntary online feedback contribution...