Rating mechanisms are becoming an essential tool for online shoppers. There have been many reputation mechanisms proposed in the literature that try to mitigate the sometimes adverse effects of strategic behavior of the traders to alter their true reputation scores. At the same time, several studies have shown the presence of bias (often unintentional) in product ratings and their harmful effect on buyers and product sales. To date there has not been any work done that studies the effect of reputation mechanisms and ratings biases on the behavior of buyers and sellers in an online marketplace. In this paper we use the concept of replicator dynamics to study the evolution of different types of sellers and buyers who use three different reputation mechanisms. Our results indicate that over time buyers gravitate towards using the adaptive model and in most scenarios the strategic and dishonest sellers are replaced by honest sellers.
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