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

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 (rating and size) on transaction prices. We go beyond the results currently available by tackling the issue of seller unobserved heterogeneity and the dynamics of reputation in price equations. We can also produce results 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). Our results show large-scale empirical evidence of a significant, positive and strong effect of seller reputation on prices.

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