For online marketplaces to succeed and prevent a market of lemons, their feedback mechanism (reputation system) must differentiate among sellers and create price premiums for trustworthy sellers as returns to their reputation. However, the literature has solely focused on numerical (positive and negative) feedback ratings, alas ignoring the role of feedback text comments. These text comments are proposed to convey useful reputation information about a seller’s prior transactions that cannot be fully captured with crude numerical ratings. Building on the economics and trust literatures, this study examines the rich content of feedback text comments and their role in building a buyer’s trust in a seller’s benevolence and credibility. In turn, benevolence and credibility are proposed to differentiate among sellers by influencing the price premiums that a seller receives from buyers. This paper utilizes content analysis to quantify over 10,000 publicly available feedback text comments of 420 sellers in eBay’s online auction marketplace, and to match them with primary data from 420 buyers that recently transacted with these 420 sellers. These dyadic data show that evidence of extraordinary past seller behavior contained in the sellers’ feedback text comments creates price premiums for reputable sellers by engendering buyer’s trust in the sellers’ benevolence and credibility (controlling for the impact of numerical ratings). The addition of text comments and benevolence helps explain a greater variance in price premiums (R 2 = 50%) compared to the existing literature (R 2 = 20%–30%). By showing the economic value of feedback text comments through trust in a seller’s benevolence and credibility, this study helps explain the success of online marketplaces that primarily rely on the text comments (versus crude numerical ratings) to differentiate among sellers and prevent a market of lemon sellers. By integrating the economics and trust literatures, the paper has theoretical and practical implications for better understanding the nature and role of feedback mechanisms, trust building, price premiums, and seller differentiation in online marketplaces.
Digital watermarks have previously been proposed for the purposes of copy protection and copy deterrence for multimedia content. In copy deterrence, a content owner (seller) inserts a unique watermark into a copy of the content before it is sold to a buyer. If the buyer sells unauthorized copies of the watermarked content, then these copies can be traced to the unlawful reseller (original buyer) using a watermark detection algorithm. One problem with such an approach is that the original buyer whose watermark has been found on unauthorized copies can claim that the unauthorized copy was created or caused (for example, by a security breach) by the original seller. In this paper, we propose an interactive buyer-seller protocol for invisible watermarking in which the seller does not get to know the exact watermarked copy that the buyer receives. Hence the seller cannot create copies of the original content containing the buyer's watermark. In cases where the seller finds an unauthorized copy, the seller can identify the buyer from a watermark in the unauthorized copy and furthermore the seller can prove this fact to a third party using a dispute resolution protocol. This prevents the buyer from claiming that an unauthorized copy may have originated from the seller.
A dynamic model with many sellers and buyers is constructed. Agents failing to trade may trade in the next period. An equilibrium is found where sellers hold identical auctions and buyers randomize over the sellers they visit. The distribution of buyer valuations is endogenous. An auction with efficient reserve is an optimal mechanism from each seller's point of view, in spite of the ability of any seller to alter the distribution of buyer types participating in the seller's mechanism by altering the mechanism. Copyright 1993 by The Econometric Society.
We consider the role that seller motivation plays in determining selling time, list price and sale price. A new survey of home sellers suggests that sellers are heterogeneous in their motivation to sell. Our findings are that a seller who, at the time of listing, has a planned date to move sells more quickly than one who does not. Also, the shorter the planned time until a move at the time of listing, the shorter the actual duration of marketing time. We find that seller motivation affects sale price, but not the list‐price markup. Our results suggest that theoretical models of the housing search process should be recast to allow for heterogeneous sellers.
Live streaming has recently become a popular direct selling channel which offers small, self-employed sellers unseen levels of consumer interaction and engagement. While the extant research focused on consumer motivation and intention to shop via live streaming, little is known from the seller’s perspective. Indeed, the potential advantages of live streaming commerce are accessible to everyone, but sellers experience different levels of success with this medium. Using a mixed quantitative and qualitative approach, this study analyses Facebook data of live streaming sellers to assess the nature and extent of engagement metrics, and delineate the dynamic, interactive live streaming sales process. We identify four sales approaches and twelve strategies adopted in acquiring and retaining customers. This typology of sales approach representing seller-focused antecedents is mapped against the relationship process and outcomes to provide a framework for understanding relationship mechanisms in live streaming commerce.
During the past decade, marketing managers and scholars have focused increased attention on buyer–seller relationships in business markets. This article contributes to the emerging body of knowledge in this important arena. Building from theories of relationships and empirical research across several disciplines, the authors specify six key underlying dimensions (connectors) that characterize the manner in which buyers and sellers relate and conduct relationships. Measures for these relationship connectors (information exchange, operational linkages, legal bonds, cooperation, and relationship-specific adaptations by buyers and sellers) are developed in a series of pretests. Then, on the basis of relationship profiles for more than 400 buyer–seller relationships sampled from a wide array of industries and market situations, the authors apply numerical taxonomy to develop an empirically based classification of different types of business relationships. Contrary to approaches used in much of the extant literature, taxonomic methods do not rely on an assumption that the connectors are highly intercorrelated or that they combine in some linear fashion to form a single underlying dimension. Furthermore, the research specifies antecedent market and purchase situations and shows that they affect when specific types of relationships are used. The research also shows how customer satisfaction and evaluations of supplier performance vary across different types of relationships. The results provide new insights about the nature of relationships in business markets.
Marketing theory and practice have focused persistently on exchange between buyers and sellers. Unfortunately, most of the research and too many of the marketing strategies treat buyer-seller exchanges as discrete events, not as ongoing relationships. The authors describe a framework for developing buyer-seller relationships that affords a vantage point for formulating marketing strategy and for stimulating new research directions.
Notes buyer‐seller interdependence is crucial to industrial marketing — industrial firms establish buyer‐seller relationships of the close kind and long term. Examines buyer‐seller nature in industrial markets by considering development as a process through time, it is based on ideas from the IMP Project. Analyses the process of establishment and development of relationship over time by considering stages in revolution. Notes also that this process described herein does not argue the inevitability of relationship development. Discusses the pre‐relationship stage: the early stage; the development stage; the long‐term stage; and the final stage with points to debate. Describes how the development of buyer‐seller relationships can be seen as a process in terms of: the increasing experience of the two companies; reduction in their uncertainty and the distance between them; growth of both actual and perceived commitment; formal and informal adaptation to each other and the investments and savings involved. Finally, states it is important to emphasize that companies should examine existing relationships according to the potential and stage of development.
Seller reputation is an important asset because buyers often choose sellers on the basis of their reputation. This is particularly true when the quality of the good or service transacted is hard to measure and the parties cannot perfectly contract on the outcome of the transaction. As a consequence, the seller will be mindfulof building and maintaining a good reputation through the information that buyers have about the seller, including previous transactions and the reports of other buyers. We introduce a unifying framework that embeds a number of different approaches to seller reputation, incorporating both hidden information and hidden action. We use this framework to stress that the way in which consumers learn affects both behavior and outcomes. In particular, the extent to which information is generated andsocially aggregated determines the efficiency of markets. After reviewing these theoretical building blocks we discuss several applications and empirical concerns. We highlight that the environment in which a transactionis embedded can help determine whether the transaction will occur and how parties will behave. Institutions, ranging from the design of online markets to norms in a community, can be understood as ensuring that concerns for reputation lead to more efficient outcomes. Similarly, the desire to affect consumer beliefs regarding thefirm’s incentives can help us understand strategic firm decisions that seem unrelated to the particular transactions they wish to promote. We conclude by considering slightly different models of reputation that lie beyond the scope of our framework, briefly reviewing the somewhat sparse empirical literature, and highlighting and suggesting future directions for research.
We construct a panel of eBay seller histories and examine the importance of eBay's reputation mechanism. We find that, when a seller first receives negative feedback, his weekly sales rate drops from a positive 5% to a negative 8%; subsequent negative feedback ratings arrive 25% more rapidly than the first one and don't have nearly as much impact as the first one. We also find that a seller is more likely to exit the lower his reputation is; and that, just before exiting, sellers receive more negative feedback than their lifetime average.
We propose that buying- and selling-price estimates reflect a focus on what the consumer forgoes in the potential exchange and that this notion offers insight into the well-known difference between those two types of value assessment. Buyers and sellers differ not simply in their valuation of the same item but also in how they assess the value. Buyers tend to focus on their sentiment toward what they forgo (typically, the expenditure), and buying prices are thus heavily influenced by variables such as salient reference prices. By the same token, sellers tend to focus on their sentiment toward surrendering the item, and selling prices are hence more heavily influenced by variables such as benefits of possessing the item. Four studies examining buying- and selling-price estimates of tickets for National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball games offer consistent support for these ideas. The studies show that naturally occurring differences among respondents in attitudes relating to the tickets that sellers forgo (e.g., significance of the game) corresponded more closely to variation in selling prices than in buying prices. Conversely, measures relating to the expenditure (e.g., respondents' concern with money) corresponded more closely to buying prices than to selling prices. Using controlled manipulations we then showed that changes in aspects relating to the game (e.g., expected climate in the stadium) affected selling prices more than buying prices, but changes relating to the expenditure (e.g., list price of the ticket) influenced buying prices more than selling prices. We also showed that drawing attention to the benefits of possessing a ticket before asking for the price estimates influenced buying prices more than selling prices, supporting our claim that otherwise these benefits are naturally more salient to sellers than buyers. Similarly, drawing attention to alternative uses of money before asking for price estimates influenced selling prices more than buying prices.
The purchasing function of U.S. manufacturing firms has long relied on price‐driven tactics to acquire an uninterrupted flow of intermediate‐products from suppliers. These tactics help reduce direct material costs for the buying firm, and allow the purchasing function to support the firm's strategic posture of overall cost leadership. Some purchasing managers, however, have begun to use “cooperative buyer/seller relationships” with a few preferred‐suppliers; this approach enhances the purchasing function's ability to support several strategic postures available to a manufacturing firm. Cooperative buyer/seller relationships allow purchasing managers to better manage the interdependent tasks of the buying and selling firms, and to become conduits of information between the manufacturing firm and its preferred‐suppliers. This article presents a general description of cooperative buyer/seller relationships, contrasts the attributes of such a relationship with traditional acquisition options (i.e., open market bargaining and vertical integration), and suggests the contributions to a firm's strategic posture available from cooperative buyer/seller relationships. While the findings presented in this article have not been tested empirically for their descriptive or predictive ability, they are based on data gathered from field interviews completed with 50 purchasing managers representing a cross‐section of organizational responsibilities and standard industrial codes.
Marketing managers must know the time orientation of a customer to select and use marketing tools that correspond to the time horizons of the customer. Insufficient understanding of a customer's time orientation can lead to problems, such as attempting a relationship marketing when transaction marketing is more appropriate. The author suggests that long-term orientation in a buyer/seller relationship is a function of two main factors: mutual dependence and the extent to which they trust one another. Dependence and trust are related to environmental uncertainty, transaction-specific investments, reputation, and satisfaction in a buyer/seller relationship. The framework presented here is tested with 124 retail buyers and 52 vendors supplying to those retailers. The results indicate that trust and dependence play key roles in determining the long-term orientation of both retail buyers and their vendors. The results also indicate that both similarities and differences exist across retailers and vendors with respect to the effects of several variables on long-term orientation, dependence, and trust.
Define a reputation good to be any product or service for which sellers' products are differentiated and consumers' search among sellers consists of a series of inquiries to relatives, friends, and associates for recommendations. Examples of reputation goods are personal legal services and primary medical care. The paper shows that if a monopolistically competitive industry sells a reputation good, then an increased number of sellers may perversely cause the industry's equilibrium price to rise. This result is based on maximizing behavior on both sides of the market: consumers are assumed to search rationally and sellers are assumed to profit maximize.
Purpose The advent of the internet and in particular the interactive features of Web 2.0 in recent years have led to an explosion of interest in customer engagement. The opportunities presented by social media to help build close relationships with customers seem to have excited practitioners in a wide variety of industries worldwide. Academic scholarship on customer engagement, however, has lagged practice and its theoretical foundation is relatively underdeveloped and a better understanding of the concept is essential to develop strategies for customer engagement. This paper seeks to address some of these issues. Design/methodology/approach The paper attempts to enhance understanding of customer engagement by examining practitioner views of customer engagement, linking it to the marketing concept, market orientation, and relationship marketing, modeling the customer engagement cycle, and developing a customer engagement matrix. Findings The paper develops a model of the customer engagement cycle with connection, interaction, satisfaction, retention, loyalty, advocacy, and engagement as stages in the cycle. It arrays customers in a customer engagement matrix according to the degree of relational exchange and emotional bonds that characterize their relationship with sellers. Four types of relationships emerge: transactional customers, delighted customers, loyal customers, and fans. Research limitations/implications The paper is an initial attempt to develop a theoretical framework for customer engagement and further research is required to better understand several aspects of the framework. Future research can also investigate questions stemming from this research, for instance, how different Web 2.0 tools may be used to build customer engagement in consumer and business markets. Practical implications Customer engagement turns customers into fans. But for customers to become fans they have to progress through the stages of the customer engagement cycle. In addition to current fans, sellers need a mix of transactional, delighted, and loyal customers who can be turned into fans in the future. A mix of digital and nondigital technologies can be employed to facilitate customers' transition through the stages in the customer engagement cycle. Originality/value The paper develops a conceptual model of customer engagement that improves understanding of the concept and provides the foundation for strategies to better satisfy customers using Web 2.0 tools like social media.
Drawing upon the framework set forth in the Interaction Model developed by the European IMP Group, examines factors leading to close relationships between buyers and sellers. An empirical test, using multiple regression analysis, demonstrates that the exchange of information and interpersonal contacts produce a co‐operative atmosphere between buyer and seller which, in turn, sets the stage for mutual adaptation. A model presented and tested affirms the relationships implied by the IMP Interaction Model and suggests managerial actions which should strengthen the links between buyer and seller.
ABSTRACT We examine whether short sellers detect firms that misrepresent their financial statements, and whether their trading conveys external costs or benefits to other investors. Abnormal short interest increases steadily in the 19 months before the misrepresentation is publicly revealed, particularly when the misconduct is severe. Short selling is associated with a faster time‐to‐discovery, and it dampens the share price inflation that occurs when firms misstate their earnings. These results indicate that short sellers anticipate the eventual discovery and severity of financial misconduct. They also convey external benefits, helping to uncover misconduct and keeping prices closer to fundamental values.
Data from downtown Boston in the 1990s show that loss aversion determines seller behavior in the housing market. Condominium owners subject to nominal losses 1) set higher asking prices of 25-35 percent of the difference between the property's expected selling price and their original purchase price; 2) attain higher selling prices of 3-18 percent of that difference; and 3) exhibit a much lower sale hazard than other sellers. The list price results are twice as large for owner-occupants as investors, but hold for both. These findings are consistent with prospect theory and help explain the positive price-volume correlation in real estate markets.
Conceptual arguments favouring a relational rather than a transactional approach to the study of buyer‐seller relationships are now well understood. However, attempts to quantify the factors contributing towards relationship quality have been held back by the complexity of the underlying factors and their interrelatedness. Traditional regression techniques are not effective in analysing data with high levels of multi‐collinearity and missing information, typical in many studies of buyer behaviour. Makes use of a relatively new technique – neural network analysis – to try to quantify the factors contributing to buyer‐seller relationship quality. The technique uses a statistically‐based learning procedure modelled on the workings of the human brain which quantifies the relationship between input and output variables through an intermediate “hidden” variable level analogous to the brain. For this study, a neural network was developed with two outcome components of relationship quality (relationship satisfaction and trust), and five input antecedents (the salesperson′s sales orientation, customer orientation, expertise, ethics and the relationship′s duration). In a comparison of multiple regression and neural network techniques, the latter was found to give statistically more significant outcomes. New applications within marketing for neural network analysis are being found. Contributes towards the development of the technique and suggests a number of further possible applications.
In this paper we study a large market in which sellers compete by offering auctions to buyers instead of simple fixed price contracts. Two variants of the model are studied. One extends a model first analyzed by Wolinsky (Rev. Econ. Stud.55(1988), 71–84) in which buyers learn their valuations only after meeting sellers. The other variant extends the model of McAfee (Econometrica61(1993), 1281–1312) in which buyers know their valuations before they choose among available auctions. The equilibrium array of auctions is characterized for each case and the efficiency properties of the equilibria are analyzed.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: D41, D44, D82.