TY  - JOUR
AU  - Einav,Liran
AU  - Kuchler,Theresa
AU  - Levin,Jonathan D.
AU  - Sundaresan,Neel
TI  - Learning from Seller Experiments in Online Markets
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 17385
PY  - 2011
Y2  - September 2011
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17385
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w17385.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Liran Einav
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA  94305-6072
Tel: 650/723-3704
Fax: 650/725-5702
E-Mail: leinav@stanford.edu

Theresa Kuchler
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA  94305-6072
E-Mail: tkuchler@stanford.edu

Jonathan D. Levin
Stanford University
Department of Economics
579 Serra Mall
Stanford, CA  94305-6072
Tel: 650/723-5962
E-Mail: jdlevin@stanford.edu

Neel Sundaresan
eBay Research Labs
2065 Hamilton Avenue
San Jose, CA 95125
E-Mail: nsundaresan@ebay.com
AB  - The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of experiments conducted by sellers across a wide array of retail products. We show how this type of data can be used to address questions about consumer behavior and market outcomes, and provide illustrative results on price dispersion, the frequency of over-bidding, the choice of reserve prices, "buy now" options and other auction design parameters, and on consumer sensitivity to shipping fees. We argue that leveraging the experiments of market participants takes advantage of the scale and heterogeneity of online markets and can be a powerful approach for testing and measurement.
ER  -