I've been investigating the hashCode() methods in java and found the one for String class strange. The source code is as follows:

public int hashCode() {
    int h = hash;
    if (h == 0 && value.length > 0) {
        char val[] = value;

        for (int i = 0; i < value.length; i++) {
            h = 31 * h + val[i];
        }
        hash = h;
    }
    return h;
}

The code itself is quite straight forward. But I wonder what's the reason for calculating hash code this way?
Why choose 31?
Why start from 0 instead of value.length - 1?
Any guarantee that this would make hashcodes less possible to collide with each other?

java hashcode
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