Reputation systems and anonymity

Reputation systems help to maintain the order in Web world, and many sites utilize this system such as Amazon and eBay. However, there is still the possibility that someone will cheat in reputation systems. According to Dellarocas, one way to prevent cheating is controlled anonymity which means that the information about the reputation is open, but the information about identity is not open. But I don't think anonymity will prevent such cheating.

I think anonymity and reputation are conflicting concepts. In reputation systems, one is discouraged from cheating or antisocial behavior because such actions will cause bad reputation and that reputation will remain open to everyone. It based on the theory that without such a kind of punishment, people will not take appropriate action. However, that theory should be applied to the people who create reputation, in other words, evaluators. It is not guaranteed that they will equally evaluate. If they can evaluate anonymously, they may evaluate someone unfairly bad or good (maybe because of prisoner's dilemma). I often see that Amazon's some customer reviews are unusually low-rated (ex. I sometimes see "1 of 16 people found the following review helpful" on the reviews which I think pretty good). You need only Amazon's account to evaluate customer's review, and no one can see who evaluated it. Such things happen because of anonymity.

To avoid such situation, evaluators should also be exposed to reputation systems. Everyone should be able to see how they evaluated. Then, there will be the reputation of evaluator, and they will be discouraged from inappropriate evaluation. The reputation of evaluator is impossible with anonymity.