Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer - the seller - follows from a nontrivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer-induced certification acts as an inspection device,...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to the...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to...

We provide elementary insights into the effectiveness of certification to increase market transparency. In a market with opaque product quality, sellers use certification as a signaling device, while buyers use it as an inspection device. This difference alone implies that seller-certification...