Abstract
Widely-used online "trust" authorities issue certifications without
substantial verification of the actual trustworthiness of recipients.
Their lax approach gives rise to adverse selection: The sites that
seek and obtain trust certifications are actually significantly less
trustworthy than those that forego certification. I demonstrate this
adverse selection empirically via a new dataset on web site
characteristics and safety. I find that TRUSTe-certified sites are
more than twice as likely to be untrustworthy as uncertified sites, a
difference which remains statistically and economically significant
when restricted to "complex" commercial sites. I also present
analogous results of adverse selection in search engine advertising -
finding ads at leading search engines to be more than twice as likely
to be untrustworthy as corresponding organic search results for the
same search terms.
See http://www.benedelman.org/publications/advsel-trust-draft.pdf
Enjoy,
Aram Perez
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