How Sellers Trick EBay's Rating System

Most of the tens of millions of items listed for sale on eBay are legitimate offerings from legitimate sellers. But as with anything, there will be the exceptions, and one of those involves a novel way of abusing eBay's "reputation" system. That's the method under which buyers and sellers rate each other.
John Morgan, a professor at the University of California Berkeley business school, found some users on eBay were artificially inflating their reputation scores via transactions designed only to serve that purpose. He explains how it works, and what eBay might do about it.

This is a most read http://www.startupjournal.com/ecommerce/ecommerce/20061222-gomes.html?refresh=on