Inflated Reputations: Uncertainty, Leniency, and Moral Wiggle Room in Trader Feedback Systems
实验发现，市场反馈系统中买家因不确定性而给出宽容评价，导致卖家声誉信息失真，进而降低卖家可信度，最终买家支付相同价格却获得更少价值。
The reputation information provided by market feedback systems tends to be compressed in the sense that reliable and unreliable sellers have similar feedback scores. The experiment presented here features a market in which what a buyer receives is a noisy signal of what was actually sent. We focus on the influence the noise has on endogenously given feedback. The attributional uncertainty creates room for leniency in feedback giving. We find that buyer leniency reduces the informativeness of the feedback system and, in combination with uncertainty, diminishes seller trustworthiness. With a noisy signal, buyers pay about the same prices but get significantly less. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.