Yhprum's Law

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Yhprum's law ( Engl. Yhprum's Law) is the inverse of Murphy's Law , wherein Yhprum a Ananym by Murphy , and is:

"Anything that can work will work."

Richard Zeckhauser, Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University , formulated the law as follows:

"Systems that shouldn't work sometimes do."

Zeckhauser cited Yhprum's law in connection with the question of why an intensive and seemingly selfless participation can be observed when evaluating ratings on eBay , although this would not actually be expected based on conventional economic theories. Resnick et al. saw Yhprum's law in the eBay rating system confirmed, as this successfully enables cooperation, although it reduces the incentive to cheat, but does not exclude fraud.

literature

  • Catherine Dupree: Integrity Has Its Price . Harvard Magazine, July / August 2003, pp. 10-12 ( online publication ( September 30, 2007 memento in Internet Archive )).
  • Michael Rapp: Orientation towards reputation systems - or: What is the point of being a good eBayer? In: kommunikation @ gesellschaft, Volume 7 (2006), Article 7 ( online publication PDF; 127 kB).
  • P. Resnick, R. Zeckhauser, J. Swanson, K. Lockwood: The Value of Reputation on eBay: A Controlled Experiment . Working paper, 2004 ( online publication PDF file; 321 kB).