Collecting and displaying product reviews written by consumers is a common practice for many retail websites. These websites, however, differ in their choice to reveal aggregate review statistics on the product list displayed while consumers browse or search to make initial product selections....

This essay considers the role of reputational information in our marketplace. It explains how well-functioning marketplaces depend on the vibrant flow of accurate reputational information, and how misdirected regulation of reputational information could harm marketplace mechanisms. It then...

We study information sharing between competing sellers in markets where consumers sample sellers sequentially. Sellers can disclose to their rival when they encounter a specific buyer. Providing this information, which we call search disclosure, can enable all forms of search history-based price...

This paper studies the role of observational learning in search markets where buyers do not take the list price as a take-it-or-leave-it offer. Using a unique data from the Beijing housing market, we estimate a structural model in which buyers infer a seller’s reservation value from the...

We shed light on a money-for-privacy trade-off in the market for smartphone applications ("apps"). Developers offer their apps cheaper in return for greater access to personal information, and consumers choose between lower prices and more privacy. We provide evidence for this pattern using data...

Despite a growing interest, researchers and practitioners still struggle to transfer the blockchain concept introduced by Bitcoin to market-oriented application scenarios. To shed light on the technology's usage in markets with asymmetric information, this study analyzes the effect of the...

Insurance intermediation services are information services which exhibit strong information asymmetries. We empirically analyze whether signaling works in the German market for insurance intermediation services. For this a signal must increase service quality and be easily identifiable by...