Most online market exchanges are governed by reputation systems, which allow traders to comment on one another’s behavior and attributes with ratings and text messages. These ratings then constitute sellers’ reputations that serve as signals of their trustworthiness and competence. The large body of research investigating the effect of reputation on selling performance has produced mixed results, and there is a lack of consensus on whether the reputation effect exists and what it means. After showing how the reputation effect can be derived from a game-theoretic model, we use meta-analysis to synthesize evidence from 107 studies investigating the reputation effect in peer-to-peer online markets. Our results corroborate the existence of the reputation effect across different operationalizations of seller reputation and selling performance. Our results also show the extent to which the reputation effect varies. We discuss potential explanations for the variation in reputation effects that cannot be attributed to sampling error and thereby point out promising avenues for future research.

大多数在线市场交易由信誉系统管理，允许交易者通过评级和短信评论彼此的行为和属性。然后，这些评级构成卖家的声誉，作为其可信度和能力的信号。调查声誉对销售业绩影响的大量研究产生了喜忧参半的结果，对于声誉效应是否存在以及它的含义缺乏共识。在展示了如何从博弈论模型中得出声誉效应之后，我们使用元分析来综合来自 107 项调查点对点在线市场中声誉效应的研究的证据。我们的结果证实了在卖家声誉和销售业绩的不同操作中存在声誉效应。我们的结果还显示了声誉效应变化的程度。我们讨论了不能归因于抽样误差的声誉影响变化的潜在解释，从而为未来的研究指出了有希望的途径。