Buyers and sellers jointly determine a market’s development and equilibrium. While the literature has focused on enhancing online marketplaces from the buyer’s perspective, designing marketplaces from the seller’s perspective has received much less attention. Practically, online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces have nurtured business and created many job opportunities, evidenced by TaoBa...

Online marketplaces have become ubiquitous as sites like eBay, Taobao, Uber and AirBnB are frequented by billions of users regularly. The success of these marketplaces is attributed not only to the ease in which buyers can find sellers, but also to the fact that they provide reputation and feedback systems that help facilitate trust. I begin by briefly describing the basic ideas of how reputati...

Seller reputation generated by consumers leaving feedback is critical to foster trust in online marketplaces. Yet feedback may be under-provided if consumers are not rewarded to leave feedback. Signaling theory predicts that only high quality sellers would reward buyers for truthful feedback. We explore this scope for signaling using Taobao’s “reward-for-feedback” mechanism and find that items ...

Research in B2B e-marketplaces has mainly focused on large organisations and literature on small firm’s perception and use of B2B e-marketplaces, specifically in Indian context has been limited. As MSMEs constitute 95 per cent of all industrial units in India, enhancing their competitiveness in globalized economy is the priority of the Government. Review of literature on B2B e-marketplace shows...

Web aesthetics is advocated as one of the key factors influencing consumers’ attitude and behavior in the websites they visited. However, its real effects on the sales performance of websites remain largely unknown. This study is one of the first empirical studies to evaluate web aesthetics quantitatively and directly measure its effects on sales performance by using real-life transaction data....

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...

This paper examines the antecedents and consequences of product uncertainty in online marketplaces by conceptualizing the dimensions of product uncertainty description uncertainty (identifying product characteristics), performance uncertainty (inferring product’s future performance) and fit uncertainty (matching product’s characteristics with buyer’s needs). It also theorizes the distinction, r...

In e-marketplaces with limited inventory where buyers’ demand is larger than sellers’ supply, promoting honesty raises new challenges: sellers may behave dishonestly because they can sell out all products without the necessity of gaining high reputation; buyers may provide untruthful ratings to mislead other buyers in order to have a higher chance to obtain the limited products. In this paper, ...

e-Market is on the agenda both in research and in practice and there is a rather broad research field. This paper examines current case studies in order to seek the e-Market benefit and some directions for future research. All data collection in this paper comes from the websites of Alibaba.com and Taobao.com, 2004-2006. The case studies provide an insight on the benefit businesses can gain fro...