Reputation and Pricing on the e-Market: Evidence from a Major French Platform

Grégory Jolivet (1) , Bruno Jullien (2, 3) , Fabien Postel-Vinay (4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13)

1 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
2 TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics
3 TSE-R - Toulouse School of Economics
4 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
5 CREST - Centre de Recherche en Économie et Statistique
6 LEA - Laboratoire d'Economie Appliquée
7 Department of Economics
8 PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques
9 CEPR - Center for Economic Policy Research
10 University of Bristol [Bristol]
11 IZA - Institute for the Study of Labor
12 DELTA - Département et Laboratoire d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée
13 INRA

We use an exhaustive data set from one of France's largest e-commerce platforms, PriceMinister.com, to estimate a statistical causal effect of a seller's reputation (and size) on transaction prices for a large range of product categories (books, CDs, video games or DVDs), product conditions (used or new) and seller types (individual or professional sellers). We go beyond the results currently available by tackling the issue of seller unobserved heterogeneity and the dynamics of reputation (and size) in price equations. Our results show large-scale empirical evidence of a significant, positive and strong effect of seller reputation on prices.

Mots clés: e-Market; e-Commerce platform; Reputation; Price

Domaines: Economies et finances

Grégory Jolivet, Bruno Jullien, Fabien Postel-Vinay. Reputation and Pricing on the e-Market: Evidence from a Major French Platform. 2014. ⟨hal-03460312⟩