Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc. demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...

Online markets pose a difficulty for evaluating products, particularly experience goods, such as used cars, that cannot be easily described online. This exacerbates product uncertainty, the buyer's difficulty in evaluating product characteristics and predicting how a product will perform in the...

Most studies on online marketplaces focus on seller uncertainty and rely on data from online marketplaces in the U.S. This paper extends this literature by focusing on product uncertainty and defining its two dimensions - description uncertainty (identifying the product‘s characteristics) and...