Using bid data from 8,000 new and used Chevrolet Corvettes sold on eBay, this paper empirically tests Akerlof's (1970) hypothesis that the used car market is characterized by low quality and informational problems. The hypothesis states that the used market has a higher proportion of low quality...

Business-to-customer (B2C) online auctions differ from customer-to-customer (C2C) online auctions by having much less sellers who have established their reputations. Thus, B2C online auctions face much lower levels of information asymmetry and relies more on seller's signaling and buyers'...

This paper explores how a seller should transmit product information to bidders with horizontally differentiated preferences. Under cheap-talk, we show that, in an informative equilibrium, the seller provides less precise information for more popular product attributes. Second, for any given...

In recent years, the rapid development of online marketplaces has not only given rise to co-opetitive relationships between sellers but also to information asymmetry between online marketplaces and sellers. This paper studies information sharing in an e-commerce setting consisting of an online...