The Role of Quality in Internet Service Markets
研究了在线采购市场中买家如何根据卖家的非价格特征（如质量）和报价进行选择，并评估了互联网全球化给买家带来的福利提升。
In online procurement markets, projects are often allocated through a mechanism that allows buyers to take into account a seller’s nonprice characteristics as well as his bid. We design a methodology to recover primitives of the environment in the presence of unobserved seller heterogeneity while accommodating two important features of such markets: buyer-specific choice sets and the high turnover of sellers. We apply our method to data from an online market for programming services, to assess buyers’ welfare gains associated with the globalization enabled by the internet. We find that the internet enables buyers to substantially improve on their outside (local) option; many of the gains arise from access to the international markets.