Voluntary Disclosure of Product Information: The Case of E-Book Samples

An important question in markets with asymmetric information is why in practice fewer sellers voluntarily disclose their private information than theory would predict. To better understand this discrepancy, I use data from an online self-publishing platform to examine the empirical relationship between pricing and voluntary disclosure. On this platform, I observe whether authors disclose characteristics of their e-books by offering free samples. In contrast to the prediction of theories of unraveling, I show that for e-books without a posted online rating, indicating that their quality is unknown to the market, offering a sample is associated with a lower price. I also show that for unrated e-books, fewer authors offer a sample while simultaneously setting a higher price than authors of rated e-books. These results can be explained by incorporating into a model a fraction of naive buyers who do not update their beliefs upon observing that a seller does not disclose. This gives low-quality sellers an incentive to conceal their quality by not disclosing and to set high prices to exploit naive buyers.