Prisoners of eBay and FOAF

1. Considering the Prisoner’s Dilemma in this chapter, provide your own insight on how sites such as eBay “work” for most participants of this popular online auction site. Do they really work? Or is there too much risk?


I personally do not use eBay for a number of reasons and I suppose that many of them overlap with the idea of the prisoner's dilemma. When applied to a social setting, the prisoner's dilemma according to Shirky is, "whenever we interact with people we could take advantage of, or people who could take advantage of us, yet actually manage to trust one another often enough to accomplish things in groups. The shadow of the future makes it possible for me to act on your behalf today, even at some risk or cost to me, on the expectation that you will remember and reciprocate tomorrow." While eBay does not necessarily have a resounding effect on groups, it can have an effect on individuals. I do not use eBay because I am worried that someone would try to screw me over and not give me the product that they had advertised. While this most likely does not happen most of the time, it is not worth the risk for me to get a faulty product. Just after hearing about a few cases of eBay not working out for some, I was dissuaded from wanting to use it. A friend of mine bought a movie a few months ago from eBay and when it came in the mail the case was of the dvd she was hoping for, but inside was season 6 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So she ended up losing about twenty bucks and getting a dvd that she did not want at all. Someone else got the reward for doing something wrong and she got the punishment.

Many people seem to trust the site and it works out quite well for them, but there are others, like myself, who do not like to take the small risk of not getting what they expected.



2. What professional benefits do you see by investing some time in a FOAF-style network?

The opportunities for networking are enormous and the great thing about FOAF networks are that you already have something in common with the people that you are networking with. Professionally, this could be very helpful because it allows you to have access to a whole different "category of people" that you otherwise might not be able to access. Say you are looking for trustworthy IT people to work on your businesses computers. Well your friend, Matt, who happens to be an IT guy probably knows a lot more IT people. If you trust Matt and you have access to all of his friends, well then, you just got yourself potentially a huge market of IT people to work on your company's computers.