"I challenge thee to a duel"

The State of Play Conference is coming up shortly, and I've been reviewing some of the draft papers. Ethan Katsh's paper on dispute resolution is interesting, because he connects his research on eBay's dispute resolution mechanisms to the virtual property issue.

eBay has a semi-automated dispute resolution mechanism which is provided by SquareTrade. It handles literally thousands of eBay disputes per day, and some of these, according to Ethan K, involve assets from the virtual world. Julian, of course, had little help from eBay when he was defrauded in-world, because of their clearly stated indifference to virtual assets for fraud claims. But eBay's dispute resolution system provides some advantages: (1) it's quick and cheap, (2) it is tied to real world reputation and is relatively robust at attempts to game, and (3) it's backed up by the might of an important player in the online space.

Of course, it's not the only way to resolve disputes. You can have sabers at dawn, or matched duelling pistols with seconds, if you want. But is that what we want? How should we resolve disputes and conflict that occurs in-world? Ethan's paper presents a number of models, but there must be others.

Comments

[Greg Lastowka]

1.

Actually, Jules had little help from *paypal*...

[Greg Lastowka]

2.

Of course, I realize that eBay *is* Paypal now, so maybe you'd expect some consistency here...

http://rss.com.com/2100-1017_3-960658.html

[Brian 'Psychochild' Green]

3.

eBay and PayPal kinda suck if you have a problem. They have no real incentive to help you should you get ripped off, even in the case of non-virtual items. It's no surprise that virtual world items are a risky proposition.

My significant other went to purchase some software online. She's taking a Photoshop class, and wanted to get a copy of the software. So, she went to eBay and found someone claiming to sell a full version of the software at a discounted, but still reasonable price. Of course, she's not as well versed in online issues as I am, and bought from someone with a really terrible rating. In the end, we got a quite blatant pirate copy of the software.

PayPal was no help. An item shipped, and that's all they care about. In hindsight, I should have lied and said I got nothing, because PayPal will refund the full amount (eBay charges "administrative fees"). What was the guy gonna do, prove that he sent pirate software?

SquareTrade wasn't going to help, because the guy obviously had incorrect contact information. His address didn't match what was on the package, which was mailed from a P.O. box in a different zip code (which was written as sloppily as possible). I tried calling his phone number and no one was there by that name. Tough to resolve a dispute if only one person comes to the table.

Further, eBay didn't care when we filed the initial fraud report; in fact, it looked like the response came from some kind of seller-run organization. Then we had to wait 30 days after the auction (but not more than 60 days!) to file a full fraud accusation. Even if eBay does figure out we were defrauded, we'll only get the price we paid less $25 ("for administration costs"). God forbid we actually pay something close to retail for this software; we would have gotten royally screwed with the cap on the money we can reclaim.

eBay makes reporting fraud as hard as they possibly can. They hope that you won't report the incident and that they can forget about it. Fraudulent sellers obviously use this system to their advantage, so they can defraud people with very little risk of complaint.

The moral of the story here? I don't think an alternative system for resolving disuptes will work until the person with the power cares. Frankly, eBay doesn't care, and shouldn't care if you consider the bottom line. How little do they really lose if one person that buys things by auction maybe 2 times per year doesn't patronize them again? Unless fraud becomes a large enough problem to cause them tens of thousands of customers, why should they bother?

Something to consider,

[sab]

4.

SquareTrade wasn't going to help, because the guy obviously had incorrect contact information. His address didn't match what was on the package, which was mailed from a P.O. box in a different zip code (which was written as sloppily as possible). I tried calling his phone number and no one was there by that name. Tough to resolve a dispute if only one person comes to the table.

[san]

5.

There are some people who have no time to "farm" or earn in-game money to play an online videogame, so they opt to buy in-game money to spend in online games.Then have a new business disapear,we often call it RMT(Real Money Trade).Which has some kinds of ways to buy gold As you could buy them from ebay once,and you can buy them from some online gold stores.
funingame">http://www.funingame.com">funingame is an exchange site which designed specifically for game virtual currencies & items trading,it is your another choice.