Complexity or simplicity? Designing product pictures for advertising in online marketplaces

Complexity or simplicity? Designing product pictures for advertising in online marketplaces

In online marketplaces, many sellers highlight product and service information directly within product pictures for advertising purposes. Such a strategy increases the visual complexity of the picture and provides more information to support buyers’ judgment. However, when other sellers adopt the same method, a given picture will not be conspicuous enough to be noticed. To address this issue, t...

Designing Online Marketplaces: Trust and Reputation Mechanisms

Accelerated Quality Discovery through Sponsored Search Advertising in Online Marketplaces

This paper analyzes the dynamic e¤ect of sponsored search advertising on quality discovery on the Taobao.com retail platform. A stylized model spells out the dynamic from a theoretical perspective: A new product’s boosted exposure from sponsored search ads could help the platform to infer how well the product converts exposure to sales (the quality measure). Because the platform awards top orga...

Product Uncertainty in Online Marketplaces in China: An Econometric Model

Most studies on online marketplaces focus on seller uncertainty and rely on data from online marketplaces in the U.S. This paper extends this literature by focusing on product uncertainty and defining its two dimensions description uncertainty (identifying the product‘s characteristics) and fit uncertainty (matching product characteristics with the buyer’s needs). It also examines the distincti...

Histone modifications: combinatorial complexity or cumulative simplicity?

P osttranslational modifications of histones have attracted enduring interest ever since it was realized that histones are hyperacetylated on lysines at actively transcribed genes (1). Because it neutralizes the charge on a lysine, acetylation was thought to reduce interactions with DNA phosphates, making the DNA more accessible for active processes such as transcription (2). In recent years, t...