Spiral of Hatred: Social Effects in Buyer-Seller Cross-Comments Left on Internet Auctions

An auction platform is a dynamic environment where a rich variety of social effects can be observed. Most of those effects remain unnoticed or even hidden to ordinary users. The in-depth studies of such effects should allow us to identify and understand the key factors influencing users’ behaviour. The material collected from the biggest Polish auction house has been analyzed. NLP algorithms were applied to extract sentiment-related content from collected comments. Emotional distance between negative, neutral and positive comments has been calculated. The obtained results confirm the existence of the spiral-of-hatred effect but also indicate that much more complex patterns of mutual relations between sellers and buyers exist. The last section contains a several suggestions which can prove useful to improve trustworthiness of users’ reports and security of an auction platform in general. Radoslaw Nielek Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology, ul. Koszykowa 86, 02-008 Warszawa, Poland, e-mail: [email protected] Aleksander Wawer Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences, ul. J.K. Ordona 21, 01-237 Warszawa, Poland e-mail: [email protected] Adam Wierzbicki Polish Japanese Institute of Information Technology, ul. Koszykowa 86, 02-008 Warszawa, Poland, e-mail: [email protected] ∗ This research has been supported by the Polish Ministry of Science grant N N516 4307 33 † This author has been supported by the grant of the Polish Ministry of Science 69/NSINGAPUR/2007/0.