To be or not to be anonymous guides discrimination in online reciprocal feedback

Theoretical and empirical work highlight the importance of trust and reciprocity in economic exchange. Online reputational feedback systems are crucial in generating trust and this is essential for economic success. Discrimination in feedback may, therefore, create inequality in the long run. We expect competition and selection to eradicate price discrimination and we, therefore, focus on discrimination in feedback. In addition, we look at discrimination and anonymity. Anonymity is a common feature online and is sometimes used as a strategy to circumvent discrimination. We construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically communicates the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction has ended. We find discrimination in feedback, but it only occurs when sellers had anonymous usernames, suggesting that anonymity as a fairness strategy might backfire.

Purpose:

Explore discrimination by gender and foreignness in buyer feedback online and how user anonymity can affect this possible discrimination.

We construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically communicates the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction has ended. The seller names signal a combination of gender and foreignness (from a stereotypical Swedish perspective). We manually collected the data. Show less..