# kaal:claim:3782198-004

**Claim.** Rating systems on centralized marketplaces are actively gamed: new Amazon sellers are solicited by sock puppet operators offering to inflate their ratings and attack competitors.

**Type.** empirical  **Support.** asserted

**Holds when.**

- observed on major centralized e-commerce platforms

**Source quote.**

> For example, one of the first things that will hap- pen if you open a shop on Amazon is that you will receive several messages from ma- licious sock-puppet wranglers offering to game the rating system to improve your company's ratings while attacking your major competitor.

**From.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, *Contemporary Decentralization* (2021), From Social Media to Decentralized Coordination, page 5

**Cite as.** Craig Calcaterra, Wulf A. Kaal, Contemporary Decentralization (2021). SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3782198

**Verify.** sha256 of source PDF `e7e1378e3eed06cace6534e7792a7307d607d18bc6beb4ac45896476280728e4` at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wulfkaal/Academic-Papers/main/papers/pdf/Calcaterra%20and%20Kaal%20-%202021%20-%20Contemporary%20Decentralization.pdf

**Failure mode.** rating-system-manipulation  (family: reputation-system-gaming)

**Topics.** reputation, regulatory-failure, economics, risk-and-incentives

**Keywords.** reputation-gaming, sock-puppets, marketplaces, incentive-design

**Related claims.**

- extended_by: https://wulfkaal.github.io/claims/3782217-012

**Canonical form.** This markdown file is the canonical hashed representation of the claim. Its sha256 is the content hash used for attestation.