Accountability and Trust for Swapping
March 28th, 2007 by jessica
One of the questions I am frequently asked involves how we deal with accountability and trust with online swapping. Accountability is important; you want to know that the person you are swapping with will hold up their end of the bargain. From the beginning of time, when the first caveman swapped meat for a club, trust is what makes barter work. So we have a couple of elements we look at to make it all work.
The first is a simple rating system. We could have built one, and did in the early days, but realized that we would then own your reputation, which did not seem fair. We partnered up with Rapleaf so that our users could own their own reputation. Who doesn’t want to work with a company that believes that it is more profitable to be ethical? The rating system is the first barrier to bad actions; when your reputation is portable and goes with you across multiple sites, you tend to make sure that you act with integrity.
In addition, the real key to swapping safely is leveraging implicit and explicit trust. In Freakonomics they talk about a study an economist conducts in Washington D.C. with bagels in break rooms. In small companies, people always pay for the bagels. If they aren’t motivated by ethics to act right, they are motivated by the fear of anyone they know finding out that they took a bagel without paying.
What do bagels have to do with swapping? Think of SwapCircles as the break room in the small company. If you are in a SwapCircle with people you know, of course everyone will behave well and swap fairly. You obviously have an explicit trust relationship with those people and can rely on them to meet their end of the bargain. If you are in a SwapCircle with people that you do not know, but have an association with, then you have implicit trust with them. You don’t know them, but because of other connections, you can rely on them to conduct a fair swap. One example of this is parents at an elementary school. You may not know the other parent, but you know that it is likely that you have acquaintances in common, and therefore you can trust each other. This happens when people invest social capital in an online community or group. You have never met, but you have been posting to the same collect forum for four years. You are invested in that forum and will therefore treat anyone fairly in a swap so that you can continue your online activities there without a damaged reputation.
We obviously believe that people mean well and most people not only act fairly, but will also understate the value of their item so that they are not perceived to be unfair. However, these ideas of rating and reputation, as well as explicit and implicit trust, are an important part of the SwapThing community. If you want to participate, the best way is to start a SwapCircle today. Don’t forget that if you use our affiliate program you can earn money for your group, association or even your child’s school.
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