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AbstractBusinesses can choose who they want to be online. Product and company attributes that are directly perceivable in the real world can be manipulated to make a favorable impres sion on online buyers. This study examines whether creating a more professional online e-image can signal consumers about unobservable product or company quality, and whether this signal influences their willingness to transact with the company, and ultimately the prices they are willing to pay for the company's goods and services. An empirical study is preVivek Choudhury was the accepting senior editor for this paper.sented that examines two online auction businesses utilizing different company names and auction listing styles to sell items in parallel over the course of one year. The Findings suggest that increasing the quality of an auction business's e-image does increase consumers' willingness to transact with the business, and increases prices received at auction.The study also demonstrates the ability to use eBay as an experimental laboratory for testing a variety of hypotheses about purchasing behavior online.
This study measures the value of website quality in terms of its impact on trust, intention to transact and price premiums. Prior research on online auctions has focused on the use of reputation systems for building trust in online auction vendors and subsequently to generate price premiums. This study examines the extent to which trust can be induced by improving the quality of online auction listings. A survey of 701 eBay users is conducted which compares the price premiums of two nearly identical online auction businesses, one that has online auction listings with a perceived high quality and the other that has substantially lower perceived quality. Results of this study indicate that website quality can explain 49% of the variation in the trust for eBay sellers. In fact, it shows that sellers with good website quality are all perceived to be equally trustworthy regardless of their eBay reputation; whereas sellers with poor website quality are not perceived to be trustworthy even if they have a high eBay reputation score. The results also show that the trust resulting from increased website quality increases intention to transact and results in price premiums of 12% (on average) for sellers with higher quality listings. Theories from marketing, economics, and social psychology are used to explain why website quality induces trust in unknown vendors without providing any concrete evidence regarding the vendor's past history.
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