Reputation is generally considered an asset, especially in e-commerce markets. Any reputation system, however, elicits strategic responses from the sellers. Using panel data on a large random sample of online sellers from China’s largest e-commerce platform, Taobao.com, we study how...

We study how the financial constraints of agents affect the behavior of principals in the context of franchising. We develop an empirical model of franchising starting with a principal-agent framework that emphasizes the role of franchisees' collateral from an incentive perspective. We estimate...