2-19-07, Week 7

Reputation Systems

My one experience with reputation systems is they are not really useful for people who are not “into” whatever site has them. Say you are a casual user at a site, you are pretty much banned from being taken seriously in a community since you do not have enough reputation. For example, I wanted to buy a product on ebay. Now, I am one of those people that isn’t very fond of shopping online, so I had never used ebay before. I wasn’t worried about that, since I figured it couldn’t be that hard to use. I found my item easily, at a great price and went to purchase it. I signed up and chose a “buy-it-now” option. My bid was rejected because the seller demanded I had purchased 10 things before. Why? What did the seller care that I hadn’t purchased anything before? How as I supposed to be able to buy anything? I didn’t want to buy from 10 unsuspicious sellers, just so I could buy the one item I wanted.

“In particular, newcomers (those with no feedback) should always be distrusted until they have somehow paid their dues, either through an entry fee or by accepting more risk or worse prices while developing their reputations.“ (Paul Resnick, Richard Zeckhauser, Eric Friedman, and Ko Kuwabara) Why for the buyer though? I was using paypal, it’s not like I can cause any damage?

My other experience with reputation was on a message board where I was trying to find specific information. The board had such a strong community that they all constantly “repped” each other, and any new user was virtually blocked from using the service. This makes for strong communities, but I’m not sure it’s the best thing in general.

One group in our class is doing a flight reputation system. I thought that was a great idea, and one real “flight” website is taking it to another level. They are giving out frequent flyer miles (that have an expiration date) as reputation points. So you post a cool flight deal, you get miles. I like that system!