At about the same time, we began to ruminate on the influence of the Internet on our lives. It seemed that the Internet occupies our time but narrows our focus, eliminating chance meetings with strangers and casual friends and ensnarling us with a narrow band of like-minded individuals.  The implication was the development an effect like marriage among siblings – eventually everyone turns into sickly idiots.  On the commercial front, the Internet not only was preventing us from chance meetings with strangers, it inhibited us from developing trust. The fact that we can’t see each other on the web seemed to mean that we couldn’t use important non-verbal signals that we rely on to divine a potential partner’s true intentions. 

Yet, a countervailing train of thought seems to be emerging, at least in terms of the development of trust.  For example, Glen Urban and others are experimenting with mechanisms to increase trust in a commercial context.  As Howard Rheingold makes clear in his just-published Smart Mobs, however, a method may have presented itself already. The answer may be found in the Ebay mechanism. Ebay has a problem: To facilitate auctions between buyers and sellers who don’t know each other.  The company uses a reputation system.  Users are requested to rate individuals who have participated in the past.  Each participant builds a “reputation” for probity based on past actions.  Relatively few and simple rules seem to be sufficient to keep this method going.  Relatedly, other knowledge-sharing communities are going strong.  Volunteer experts are contributing their knowledge on a wide variety of products, services, and issues.  In fact, says, Rheingold, “compulsive contributors” (p. 119) are emerging.  Examples of such communities include Epinions and Allexperts.com.

In the international context, for “trust” between unrelated companies without a history of working together, we have historically substituted third-party, quasi-legalistic mechanisms such as letters of credit. And on the sales side, we have considered it necessary to do as much personal selling as possible to get the face-to-face contact that helps to develop trust.  Is there now any chance to increase trust across borders, utilizing the reputation model utilized by Ebay?  Is there a potential “market” in which buyers of products from a foreign company can attest to the utility of industrial products – a product review – or to the reliability of a foreign supplier? 

These and similar questions are being investigated primarily in the domestic context.  The international environment brings up new issues. For example, is an Ebay-style reputation service likely to survive cross-cultural differences?  Will we trust reviewers from certain cultures but not others?
 

Putnam, Robert (2000), Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster).

Rheingold, Howard (2002), Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing).

Shankar, Venkatesh, Glen L. Urban, and Fareena Sultan (2002), "Online Trust: A Stakeholder's Perspective, Concepts, Implications and Future Directions," Journal of Strategic Information Systems, forthcoming December.