Sales Mechanisms in Online Markets: What Happened to Internet Auctions?

Abstract

At least one co-author has disclosed a financial relationship of potential relevance for this research. Further information is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w19021.ack NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peerreviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…More generally, our results suggest an important tradeoff for market designers, who set the rules of online platforms, including the pricing mechanisms (Einav et al 2013) and the information that is available and actionable at the time of transaction (Luca 2016). Market design principles have generally focused on increasing the information flow within a platform (Bolton et al 2013, Che and HÖrner 2014, Dai et al 2014, Fradkin et al 2014), but we highlight a situation in which platforms may be providing too much information.…”

Market Transparency, Adverse Selection, and Moral Hazard

“…A second to last alternative reason why ratings have increased due to changes within the eBay system could be that buyer demand has shifted from auctions to fixed-price offerings, as documented by Einav, Farronato, Levin, and Sundaresan (2013), in particular in their Figure 1.…”

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy: Evidence from a Field Experiment

“…More generally, our results suggest an important tradeoff for market designers, who set the rules of online platforms, including the pricing mechanisms (Einav et al 2013) and the information that is available and actionable at the time of transaction (Luca forthcoming).…”