With internet commerce, a buyer cannot directly examine the product and so must rely upon the accuracy and reliability of the seller in deciding whether and how much to bid. In this setting, the seller's reputation can become an important factor in the bid. This paper examines the impact of the seller's reputation on the willingness of buyers to bid on items sold via internet auctions, using a 1999 mint condition U.S. $5 gold coin whose average price was $32.73. The empirical results show that the seller's reputation has a positive, statistically signi¢cant, but small impact on the price.
In online commerce, a buyer cannot directly examine the product and has to trust the seller for the product description and delivery. In this setting, the reputation of the seller, together with any other information signals on the quality of the product, can play an important role in determining the buyer's willingness to pay for the good. However, while the impact of reputation on willingness to pay for homogeneous goods has been examined, its impact on heterogeneous goods is largely unknown. This paper examines the effects of the seller's reputation and information signals in online auctions, using U.S. silver Morgan dollar coins in "Almost Uncirculated" condition that are sold on eBay. The empirical results indicate that a seller's overall reputation typically has a positive and statistically significant impact on a buyer's willingness to pay in online auctions. The results also indicate that negative comments about a seller have large negative impact on price. However, these reputational effects tend to be of greater importance for more heterogeneous goods, and are also sensitive to the presence of other information signals about the item-specific characteristics of the good.
Current tax treatment of online business-to-consumer transactions may be one of the factors behind rapidly growing e-commerce. In this article, the authors examine the impact of state sales taxes on the consumer decision to conduct shopping online, using comprehensive data representative of the U.S. population. The estimation results demonstrate that there exists a direct relationship between the state sales tax rate and consumer participation in e-commerce. However, although statistically significant, this effect is relatively small. The estimates indicate that a 1 percent increase in the tax price leads to only a 0.5 percent decline in the probability of participation in online commerce.
The augmentation of a ballistic process, based on the well known solid propellant burning by an electrothermal (ET) energy source, is the subject of an experimental and theoretical investigation to obtain improved launching techniques. The plasma jet formation method, the internal ballistics modeling approach and the experimental test bed are described. Experimental results are disclosed showing the enhanced burning rate of a solid propellant ignited and augmented by the injection of plasma jets. We also present preliminary experimental evidence of improved performance of the new proposed method over that of conventional ballistics using solid propellant alone.
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