Institut für Nachhaltiges Management

Reputation systems promote cooperation in large-scale online markets for illegal goods. These so-called cryptomarkets operate on the Dark Web, where legal, social, and moral trust-building mechanisms are difficult to establish. However, for the reputation mechanism to be effective in promoting cooperation, traders have to leave feedback after completed transactions in the form of ratings and short texts. Here we investigate the motivational landscape of the reputation systems of three large cryptomarkets. We employ manual and automatic text mining methods to code 2 million feedback texts for a range of motives for leaving feedback. We find that next to self-regarding motives and reciprocity, moral norms (i.e. unconditional considerations for others’ outcomes) drive traders’ voluntary supply of information to reputation systems. Our results show how psychological mechanisms interact with organizational features of markets to provide a collective good that promotes mutually beneficial economic exchange.

Social norms promote cooperation in human groups. How are these norms and cooperation affected when groups change due to new members arriving and old members leaving? In this review we highlight the scant literature that researches the effects of group changes on social norms and cooperation. Thus far evidence suggests that newcomers cooperate less than incumbents but adjust their cooperation levels over time. However, this adjustment is not necessarily accompanied by adjustments in terms of group identification and norms. We also point to the data limitations that ensue when researching phenomena at the group level and outline future research directions.

Signaling theory is concerned with situations of strategic interdependence in which one actor (the sender) aims at persuading another actor (the receiver) of a fact the receiver does not know or is uncertain about. The unobserved fact can be a quality of the sender the receiver would like to know and act upon. Signaling theory has been used to explain individuals’ investments in higher education, advertisement, cultural consumption, aggressive behavior, and decision-making in social dilemmas. In this chapter, we give an overview of how signaling theory can be used to explain trust and trustworthiness in social exchange. After restating the core elements of the theory, we discuss conceptual extensions to the basic framework which have proved useful in explaining trust and trustworthiness in social exchange. In particular, we show how distinguishing between signaling costs and benefits, signals and signs, and the production and display of signals and signs can make signaling theory more broadly applicable in sociological scholarship. We illustrate these conceptual extensions with empirical evidence from laboratory experiments. The chapter concludes with an outlook on future research.