Buyer-Seller Social Interaction and Sales Activity in Online P2P Markets for Used Goods
SSRN, ISSN: 1556-5068
2021
- 1,512Usage
- 7Captures
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Example: if you select the 1-year option for an article published in 2019 and a metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019. If you select the 3-year option for the same article published in 2019 and the metric category shows 90%, that means that the article or review is performing better than 90% of the other articles/reviews published in that journal in 2019, 2018 and 2017.
Citation Benchmarking is provided by Scopus and SciVal and is different from the metrics context provided by PlumX Metrics.
Article Description
P2P Markets for used goods suffer from acute information asymmetry. Sellers often have little transaction history, and goods are of uncertain quality. Many platforms thus integrate social features so buyers and sellers may achieve trust through unstructured socialization. However, prior research provides scant evidence about the benefits of these features for seller performance. Although engaging socially with peers may provide a means for trust-building, recent work points to misbehavior by some sellers, who spread misinformation and spam to undermine competitors. We thus examine the value of these features, exploiting a natural experiment wherein a large P2P market for second-hand goods (Xianyu) unexpectedly removed its social interaction feature (Fishponds). Leveraging data capturing more than 180,000 transactions over a multi-week period around the event, we provide evidence that eliminating social interaction features led to a large, statistically significant decline in seller revenues. Further, exploring heterogeneity in the effects around a variety of seller and product listing features, we nd evidence consistent with the notion that the sellers who benefit most from social interaction features are generally those who have the hardest time establishing trust. Our results provide robust evidence that social interaction thus serves a crucial role in mitigating information asymmetry in P2P markets for used goods. Our work offers nontrivial managerial implications, both for marketplace operators and individual sellers.
Bibliographic Details
http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?partnerID=HzOxMe3b&scp=85110875782&origin=inward; http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3799776; https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=3799776; https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3799776; https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3799776; https://ssrn.com/abstract=3799776
Elsevier BV
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