How Effective Are Electronic Reputation Mechanisms? An Experimental Investigation
通过实验室实验，比较了有在线反馈的市场、无反馈市场以及固定伙伴市场，发现反馈机制虽能提升交易效率，但存在公共品问题：信任和诚信行为的收益由整个社区共享，而非完全内部化。
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, we compare trading in a market with online feedback (as implemented by many Internet markets) to a market without feedback, as well as to a market in which the same people interact with one another repeatedly (partners market). We find that while the feedback mechanism induces quite a substantial improvement in transaction efficiency, it also exhibits a kind of public goods problem in that, unlike in the partners market, the benefits of trust and trustworthy behavior go to the whole community and are not completely internalized. We discuss the implications of this perspective for improving feedback systems.