Seller reputation and buyer feedback.

Abstract

Reputation has a strong influence on online market outcomes, and communication in the form of feedback (e.g., online message boards) plays an important role in determining one's reputation. Although the economic benefits of reputation systems have been well-documented, reputation systems might also have economic costs. In this article we ask whether transactions numerically scored as "positive" are more likely to be associated with negative written feedback when a seller has a relatively low reputation. Our analysis of this question is based on data from the Chinese online marketplace, Taobao.com. We collected over 2,500 numerical evaluations and written messages from buyers to sellers, where in all cases the buyers numerically scored their transaction experience as "positive." Using the XH message classification game (Houser & Xiao, 2011), evaluators who were blind to the transaction details categorized buyer's written messages from these transactions as reflecting a "positive," "negative" or "neutral" experience. We discover that positive numerical feedback is accompanied by less positive textual comments when sellers have already received more feedback (that is, when the sellers have been on Taobao longer or have had more transactions for other reasons). We discuss multiple competing explanations for this finding.

The impact of order fulfillment information disclosure on consequences of deceptive counterfeits

“…Prior to exploring the interplay of “sold by” and “shipped by” in the pre‐purchase signal set, we explore why consumers are expected to develop higher product quality perception when the party responsible for inventory ownership (i.e., the seller) or order fulfillment (i.e., the shipper) is the online retailer rather than a third‐party seller 1 . In general, a firm's credibility among consumers is built through its overall reputation (Fombrun & Shanley, 1990, Fombrun, 1996; Fan et al., 2016; Weiss et al., 1999; Zhang et al., 2016), which can be cultivated over time by delivering expedient and satisfactory resolutions of service problems (Mukherjee & Nath, 2007). Although many online retailers do not possess the general recognition enjoyed by larger retailers such as Amazon.com, they may nonetheless establish credibility through alternate means such as providing easily verified identity information.…”