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 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...

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...

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...

We analyse pricing, e¤ort and tipping decisions in the online service GoogleAnswers. While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, theycan additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post.In line with the related experimental literature we …nd evidence that tippingis...