¹School of Management, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China
²School of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China
³Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, China

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Abstract—Reputation Speculation behavior means that the buyers and sellers collaborate with each other to make fake transaction and give positive feedbacks in order to raise reputation level of online shops. This paper finds that reputation speculation is widely adopted and becomes an industry in China, making the consumers distrust the reputation of online stores, which is not conducive for the long-term development of E-commerce market. It discusses the four forms of the Reputation Speculation behavior and their characteristics in China’s C2C market. It investigates the value and cost of reputation speculation, finds that the fact buyer tends to trade with seller who has higher reputation than others stimulates sellers to increase their feedback score in an abnormal way; reputation speculation does bring higher economic value to online shops than the cost of reputation speculation. Furthermore, free-charge model and lacking of regulation speculation on C2C platform jointly contribute to the emergence of the Reputation Speculation Business in China. Charging each transaction on C2C, establishing the information exchange between platform and logistics, setting up a national-wide E-commerce reputation-worthy system are most effective to curb the development of reputation speculation industry.

Index Terms—C2C E-commerce, Online Reputation, Reputation Speculation, Feedback Score.

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Cite: Geng Tian, Hui Peng, Chao Sun, Yijun Li, "Analysis of Reputation Speculation Behavior in China’s C2C E-Commerce Market," Journal of Computers vol. 7, no. 12, pp. 2971-2978, 2012.