E-commerce Marketplaces

Scarcity bots, seller networks, review manipulation, account takeover, and legitimate commercial automation.

Canvas focus

• Actors: buyers, sellers, marketplace, brands, logistics providers, resellers, fraud rings, and automation vendors.
• Harms: inventory capture, price distortion, counterfeit trade, review fraud, payment loss, and seller exclusion.
• Policy tension: authorized seller APIs and inventory tools coexist with prohibited scraping, purchasing, and manipulation.
• Economics: margins, account acquisition, payment instruments, fulfillment, and resale liquidity determine attack scale.
• Interventions: purchase limits, holds, queueing, reward removal, listing restrictions, payment review, and network enforcement.

Research questions

• Does friction allocate scarcity fairly or merely favor sophisticated users?
• Which graph relationships justify action against a seller network?
• How is displaced abuse measured across accounts and marketplaces?
• What obligations arise when enforcement freezes seller funds or livelihoods?