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

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

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

Keywords: e-Market; e-Commerce platform; Reputation; Price

Domains: Humanities and Social Sciences; Economics and Finance

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