Reputation and Prices on the e-Market:Evidence from a Major French Platform

Résumé

The broad aim of this paper is to gain some insight into the quantitative importance of reputation in e-commerce. We use an exhaustive data set from one of France’s largest e-commerce platforms, <a href="http://www.priceminister.com/">PriceMinister.com </a>, to estimate a statistical causal effect of a seller’s reputation (and size) on transaction prices for a uniquely large range of product categories (books, CDs, video games or DVDs), product conditions (used or new) and seller types (individual or professional sellers). We go beyond the results currently available in the empirical literature by tackling the issue of seller unobserved heterogeneity and the weak exogeneity of reputation (and size) in price equations. Our results show large-scale empirical evidence of a significant, positive and strong effect of seller reputation on prices. </br> </br> <a href="http://www.priceminister.com/">http://PriceMinister.com </a>