ABSTRACT

On e-commerce platforms, consumers rely heavily on online reviews, sales volume, and social media discussions to infer product quality. As a result, the past decade has witnessed an explosive growth of seller-initiated misrepresentation of quality through fake reviews, fake sales, and fake posts. We develop an analytical model to investigate sellers’ competition in quality misrepresentation in agency pricing and the platform’s policies. The platform can discourage sellers’ quality misrepresentations by increasing the cost of misrepresentation or implementing a more lenient product return policy. We find that while a stricter anti-misrepresentation policy deters the misrepresentation of the high-quality seller, such a strategy may unintendedly incentivize the low-quality seller to misrepresent the quality more. Furthermore, increasing return leniency deters low-quality seller’s misrepresentation in a wider range of market conditions than increasing the misrepresentation cost. We show sellers’ online quality misrepresentation behaviors in a competitive setting, and our results have practical implications for platform policies.

摘要

在电子商务平台上，消费者严重依赖在线评论、销量和社交媒体讨论来推断产品质量。因此，过去十年见证了卖家通过虚假评论、虚假销售和虚假帖子发起的质量虚假陈述的爆炸式增长。我们开发了一个分析模型来调查卖家在代理定价和平台政策中的质量虚假陈述方面的竞争。该平台可以通过增加虚假陈述的成本或实施更宽松的产品退货政策来阻止卖家的质量虚假陈述。我们发现，虽然更严格的反虚假陈述政策可以阻止高质量卖家的虚假陈述，但这种策略可能会无意中激励低质量卖家更多地虚假陈述质量。此外，与增加虚假陈述成本相比，增加退货宽大可在更广泛的市场条件下阻止低质量卖方的虚假陈述。我们展示了卖家在竞争环境中的在线质量虚假陈述行为，我们的结果对平台政策具有实际意义。