Technologies of Governance

Hunting for Christmas presents, I noticed an interesting experiment in institutional design on ebay UK. Apparently, a new community court system is being tested to solve disputes over individual feedback ratings. The basic idea is as follows (details here):

• If you think you received an unfair feedback rating, you can start an appeal by posting a statement of up to 100 words and uploading up to three photos as evidence.
• The person who left the negative feedback has 14 days to justify the comment and post a counter-statement and photos, respectively.
• Once the response is in, you have another two days for commenting on the response.
• The case is then randomly allocated to 100 ebay jury members to be voted upon: if at least 70 think the feedback should be removed, it will. Otherwise, it remains in your profile and becomes part of your reputation.

The idea of a community court is not exactly new. Having a group of citizens as “finders of the fact” is at the heart of the jury trial as especially Anglo-Saxon lawyers (and courtroom thrillers) will tell you. What is new, however, is the scaling of the jury in a digitally networked environment. With no deliberation or even knowledge of each other’s identities, 100 experienced ebay members are randomly selected from a pool of volunteers and decide individually by mouse click on the fairness of a given piece of feedback. The result is a large-scale collaborative group judgment based on the evidence provided by the parties. Justice, one could say, is being “peer-produced” from a commons of normativity – thanks to the low-cost, bi-directional architecture of the Internet.

Will it work in practice?

It seems that the success of the ebay community courts will hinge on whether the designers manage to strike a balance between efficiency and (perceived) fairness. To judge from the outside, efficiency seems to be taken good care of: an automated procedure with clearly defined time frames and responsibilities for parties and jurors, immediate enforcement of the judgment through technology, and no options for further appeal (at least within the ebay community).

As far as fairness is concerned, time will show whether the courts meet the normative expectations of the community. Some speculation: active ebay members seem to be well suited to judge the fairness of a comment as they have first-hand experience of what is considered “good” and “bad” in their community (which may well differ from what is considered “good” or “bad” in other contexts). They also know about the consequences of negative ratings for a seller’s reputation. Apart from this “practical knowledge,” ebay’s designers seem to have tried to tackle the problem of bias. Not only are cases assigned randomly to members, who volunteered for jury service. The rather large number of “jurors” also suggests that potential outliers and extreme views are likely to be buried in the mainstream of the crowd. By design, individual judgments are made independently from one another, which may help the community courts avoid the well-known pitfalls of group decision-making like informational cascades, herding, or groupthink. This looks very much like the Condorcet Jury Theorem in action. Still, the procedure remains a very crude one and is likely to be criticized.

It will be interesting to see how these large-scale collaborative group judgments fare in the community – and what we may learn from this new kind of digital institution for other contexts.