Two years ago, the economist Paul Resnick wrote about his work on eBay:
I think there are two problems with the official and community encouragement to resolve disputes before leaving negative feedback. First, patterns of mild dissatisfaction are not recorded, so lots of useful information is lost. Second, sellers have become overly sensitive any negative or even neutral effect because it is so rare. If negative feedback were given 5% or 10% of the time, on average, then sellers would worry about keeping their percentage down, but wouldn’t be as concerned about any particular feedback.
Negative feedback is rare because it is powerful, as a kind of nuclear option, but as a result, there is a huge information assymetry, where frequently but mildly poor sellers are less likely to be spotted.
Earlier this year, Toolhaus launched Ebay Negs!, which is the next phase of that cat/mouse game.
Ebay Negs! lets you view all the negative feedback an eBay user has received. To use it, first highlight the ebay username you want to check with your mouse, then right click and select “Ebay Negs!” You will then be transferred to a page at http://www.toolhaus.org where all the negative feedback remarks that user have received will be displayed.
This assumes the very imbalance that Resnick was talking about in 03 — indeed, the comments posted on the tool page all call it a time saver, indicating how little value is placed on even an overwhelming preponderance of positive comments.
This is analogous to stocks falling when a company exactly meets its earnings target. Since the target was announced by the company itself, and since the accounting tricks that can be used to massage earnings are many, a company that can’t beat a hurdle it sets for itself is assumed to be in trouble. In the same way, if a negative rating on eBay means that all communal norms and attempts at dispute resolution failed, making tools for ferreting out even single examples of negative comments worth the users’s time.
It’s interesting that as transparent a market as eBay has grown an information assymetry problem all its own, and tools like eBay Neg, while helpful to individual buyers in the short run, and just going to ratchet up the overall pressure more.
1. paolo on June 7, 2005 5:51 AM writes...
Something very interesting is "Feedback extortion".
from http://pages.ebay.co.uk/help/community/investigates.html # Feedback extortion - Demanding any action of a fellow user that he or she is not required to do, at the threat of leaving negative feedback. ("Even though it didn't reach reserve, sell it to me for my bid or..."; "Pay me £100.00 or I will..."; "Sell me all of the Dutch items or I will get all of my friends to...")
Since some people live essentially with a shop on ebay (their business) and since receiving even a single negative feedback (a nuclear bomb!) is very bad for your business, I suspect this attack is very successful, i.e. target people are often willing to pay in order to avoid an (unfair) negative rating.
By the way, do you think this is a bug (in the conceptual ebay model)? or maybe a feature (in sociological terms)? Well, if social software is something that get spammed, I guess this should be considered as a feature...
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