A few months ago, one of my friends that was participating in a prank war with some other friends woke up to people ringing her doorbell telling her they were there to pick up the free couch. Apparently her friends had posted an advertisement for a “free furniture takeaway” on Craig’s List. This leads me to believe that as useful as Craig’s List is, it could use a little help in the reputation system department. In a website that focuses a lot around organizing purchases, exchanges, advertising events, requesting services and tons of other person-to-person transactions, trust is clearly necessary. Forums like Craig’s List are subject to a lot of fraud, and a better reputation system would help people feel more comfortable about using the site.
I think a type of “Feedback Forum” like Resnick et al. would be very useful for Craig’s List. Users should be allowed to rate one another based on how good of a seller, buyer, searcher, etc. they are. In addition each of these areas should have subcategories that suggest how true to description items they were selling were, how fast they were with exchanges, how quickly they paid, etc. In addition, I think a feature that allows video or audio chat between users would be useful since the Bos et al. study suggests that trust fragility is less of an issue with richer mediums. In addition user’s could be required to upload profiles with pictures, since reduced social presence can often foster trust fragility problems.
One possible reward tactic would be to offer users with good ratings higher listing results on searches. If I search for Mets tickets, the users offering them with high ratings’ posts could come up first, therefore giving people an incentive to get good feedback. The system isn’t perfect however and I think would be especially susceptible to the pseudonym issues that Resnick et al. discuss. Perhaps in order to create a Craig’s List account, you should be required to give your full name, phone number, address and email information, then when people create new accounts, they should check their information to see if it’s valid and compare it to other’s in the database to make sure people aren’t creating new account to avoid bad ratings.
It’s not a perfect solution, but it might have possibly prevented my friend from waking up to someone attempting to haul away her whole living room.
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Certainly this idea seems to make sense, especially considering how services like eBay implement similar reputation systems. I'm wondering, however, if by implementing a more strict system, some of the ad hoc exchanges of information and goods would be less likely to occur compared to how the service is now. I think it's a great idea, but I just wonder if such a structural change would have negative side effects.
ReplyDeleteI haven’t used Craig’s List very much, but I would have thought that a rating system would be standard on a website with such a high amount of buyers and sellers. Otherwise, aside from trusting in the description, there is no way to tell a high quality item from a low quality one. In your friend’s situation, there was no way to tell a real ad from a fake one, which is also an issue. Your reputation system seems like it would work, because it provides visible feedback, and similar systems have already been implemented successfully on other websites.
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