Law Commons^™

My Reputation Always Had More Fun Than Me: The Failure Of Ebay's Feedback Model To Effectively Prevent Online Auction Fraud, Mary M. Calkins

Richmond Journal of Law & Technology

Online auctions for goods are currently a popular and lucrative form of e-commerce, but present special problems of trust and fraud prevention, because most deals involve buyers and sellers who do not know each other and are separated by distance. Online auctions for goods have been largely unregulated by formal laws. For that reason, trust-building and fraud prevention have primarily been accomplished through creative private regulatory models implemented by the auction houses themselves. This Comment examines one popular model, a registration and feedback system pioneered by the leading online auction company, eBay. Under this system, a user builds a public …