My George Mason University colleague Dan Houser just wrote a very nice paper with the University of Arizona’s John Wooders showing that a seller on eBay can expect to fetch higher prices for his offerings the more positive is his reputation, especially as revealed in eBay’s user profiles. (The title of the paper is "Reputation in Auctions: Theory, and Evidence from eBay." I’ll try later today or tomorrow to provide a link to the paper.)
Having digested Dan Klein’s important volume Reputation, this result doesn’t surprise me. But it’s reassuring to see my priors confirmed by another high-quality, careful empirical study.
