Trust that suppliers and buyers will keep their word is a necessary ingredient to a well functioning marketplace. Nowhere is the issue trickier than for electronic markets, where transactions tend to be geographically diffuse and anonymous, putting them out of the reach of the legal safeguards...

Online reputation - "feedback" - mechanisms aim to mitigate the moral hazard problems associated with spatially distant exchange among strangers by providing traders with the type of information available in small groups, where members are frequently involved in one another's dealings. We...