Reputation and Trust

David, S. & Pinch, T. (2006). Six degrees of reputation: the use and abuse of online review and recommendation systems. ?

"Lake Wobegon" appeared at the very beginning of Introduction of which I had no idea. According to Wikipedia, it is a fable place in Minnesota, and a play of words "woe-be-gone," or no trouble at all. The explanation of the Lake Wobegon effect is more interesting: "The characterization of the fictional location, where 'all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average,' has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others."

So online reviews of products (CDs and books in the article) are often inaccurate and conspicuous, yet many people rely on them to assess products. It is not an easy decision to make when offline, it becomes even more complicated online where everybody can post (or copy and paste) a review for various purposes. Further, when reviewers' reputation can be managed through different strategies, trust becomes problematic.

It is critical for novice online consumers to know how the reviewing system works and how to interpret those recommendations and ratings. The authors suggested that the current online reviewing system embedded six degrees of reputation (p.5) is "nuanced" since online behavior is more regulated by code and norms, and less by laws. My question is how the prevalent review system could be improved to break the "cultural Lake Wobegon"? What are the incentives for reviewers to provide more accurate, less-biased recommendations?


Cyr, D., Hassanein, K., Head, M. & Ivanov, A. (?). The role of social presence in establishing loyalty in e-service enviroment. ?

This looks like a neat research paper since it not lonly proposed a model of e-loyalty (elements contributing to the e-loyalty include trust, technology acceptance, enjoyment and perceived social presentce), but also conducted a well-designed experiment to test the hypotheses. Social presense is measured at 5 levels: 1) text and logo, 2) text, logo and photo, 3) live chat added, 4) reading and write review added, 5) all features available. As a result, level 5 of course scored the highest in perceived social presence. It is one thing to claim that increased opportuntities of interaction will lead to better social presence, but another to design and complete a "scientific" experiment to test it.

A question not quite related to the article: is there such a thing as e-loyalty with so many similar websites providing so many similar products and services? I can understand that there might be some sort of attachment to an online community, but I doubt how many online shoppers will be loyal to one or two e-commerce site?