“Reputational Heuristics” Violate Rationality: New Empirical Evidence in an Online Multiplayer Game

“Reputation systems” are widely used in e-commerce, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding platforms, as well as in a multitude of different web-based services. However, recent works stressed how the attribution of the reputation could be unrelated to the actual behaviour of the users. The aim of this study was to investigate which factors influenced the formation and the maintenance of the reputation in an online multiplayer game. Our study provided further and novel evidence of how people greatly rely on the previous acquired reputation of their interactors, whenever they are asked to rate them after a game’s interaction. The “Reputational heuristics” adopted by players appeared to neglect the actual interactor’s behaviour, in favor of a judgement in accordance with his behaviour.