Until recently, Internet was considered as technology that will make the trade in goods frictionless. Online retailers' margins were to fall to zero and prices - according to theory of economics - were to equalize as a result of buyers comparing prices more easily (e.g. using shop bots)....

In Buy-It-Now (BIN, hereafter) auctions, sellers can make a "take-it-or-leave-it" price offer (BIN price) prior to an auction. We analyse experimentally how eBay sellers set BIN prices and whether they benefit from offering them. Using the real eBay environment in the laboratory, we find that...

We investigate experimentally on eBay how sellers set prices in "Buy-It-Now" (BIN) auctions. We find that the eBay format leads to prices substantially below those expected in second-price auctions. Moreover, our results reveal that the information available on eBay about buyer experience and...

Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get betterfitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable for the platform and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive better...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...

Online shops could offer each website customer a different price. Such personalised pricing can lead to advanced forms of price discrimination based on individual characteristics of consumers, which may be provided, obtained, or assumed. An online shop can recognise customers, for instance...

To entice customers to purchase, sellers on online platforms often misrepresent the quality of their goods/services, e.g., by manipulating consumer opinion. We analyze an oligopoly where sellers, heterogeneous in their true quality, compete by jointly choosing their prices and the extent of...

In eBay s Buy-it-Now auctions sellers can post prices at which buyers can purchase a good prior to an auction. We study how sellers set Buy-it-Now prices when buyers have independent private values for a single object for sale. We test the predictions of a model by combining the real auction...

This paper addresses the pricing problem of an online service marketplace under asymmetric information. An example is an online learning platform such as Coursera that provides courses from suppliers (in this case, universities) to learners. We focus on the matching function of the marketplace...