A Dollar for Your Thoughts: Feedback-Conditional Rebates on eBay
通过在eBay上开展实地实验，研究发现提高返利金额几乎不增加买家提供反馈的概率，但低交易质量会促使买家更快给出负面反馈；返利能减少低质量交易中的负面反馈，表明买家存在互惠行为。
We run a series of controlled field experiments on eBay where buyers are rewarded for providing feedback. Our results provide little support for the hypothesis of buyers’ rational economic behavior: the likelihood of feedback barely increases as we increase feedback rebate values; also, the speed of feedback, bid levels, and the number of bids are all insensitive to rebate values. By contrast, we find evidence consistent with reciprocal buyer behavior. Lower transaction quality leads to a higher probability of negative feedback as well as a speeding up of such negative feedback. However, when transaction quality is low (as measured by slow shipping), offering a rebate significantly decreases the likelihood of negative feedback. All in all, our results are consistent with the hypothesis that buyers reciprocate the sellers’ “good deeds” (feedback rebate, high transaction quality) with more frequent and more favorable feedback. As a result, sellers can “buy” feedback, but such feedback is likely to be biased. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2074 . This paper was accepted by Teck-Hua Ho, behavioral economics.