To be or not to be anonymous guides discrimination in online reciprocal feedback

We construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically communicates the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction has ended. We find discrimination in feedback, but it only occurs when sellers had anonymous usernames, suggesting that anonymity as a fairness strategy might backfire. Purpose: Explore discrimination by gender and foreignness in buyer feedback online and how user anonymity can affect this possible discrimination.

We construct a field experiment on eBay, where half of the sellers disclose their names in their usernames while the other half do not. eBay, however, automatically communicates the seller’s names to the buyer after the auction has ended. The seller names signal a combination of gender and foreignness (from a stereotypical Swedish perspective). We manually collected the data.