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

Applying an evolutionary framework, we investigate how a reputation mechanism and abuyer insurance (as used on Internet market platforms such as eBay) interact to promote trustworthinessand trust. Our analysis suggests that the costs involved in giving reliable feedbackdetermine the gains from...

We report on a research program that employs the indirect evolutionary approach to analyze how the institutional environment drive the evolution of trust and trustworthiness through the evolution of moral preferences, and how in turn the evolution of preferences shapes the evolution of the...

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...

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...

Feedback withdrawal mechanisms in online markets aim to facilitate the resolution of conflicts during transactions. Yet, frequently used online feedback withdrawal rules are flawed and may backfire by inviting strategic transaction and feedback behavior. Our laboratory experiment shows how a...

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,...