| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w26776 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 26776 |
| Digitization and Pre-Purchase Information: The Causal and Welfare Impacts of Reviews and Crowd Ratings | |
| Imke C. Reimers; Joel Waldfogel | |
| 发表日期 | 2020-02-24 |
| 出版年 | 2020 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Digitization has led to product proliferation, straining traditional institutions for product discovery; but digitization has also spawned crowd-based rating systems. We compare the relative impacts of professional critics and crowd-based Amazon star ratings on consumer welfare in book publishing. We assemble data on daily Amazon sales ranks, star ratings, and prices for thousands of books in 2018, along with information on their professional reviews in several major outlets. Using various fixed effects and discontinuity-based empirical strategies, we estimate that a New York Times review raises estimated sales by 78 percent during the first five days following a review; and the elasticity of sales with respect to an Amazon star is about 0.75. We use these causal estimates to calibrate structural models of demand for measuring the welfare impact of pre-purchase information in a way that respects the distinction between ex ante and ex post utility. The aggregate effect of star ratings on consumer surplus is roughly 15 times the effect of traditional review outlets. Crowd-based information now accounts for the vast majority of pre-purchase information, but the absolute effects of professional reviews have not declined over time. |
| 主题 | Industrial Organization ; Market Structure and Firm Performance ; Industry Studies |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w26776 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/584450 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Imke C. Reimers,Joel Waldfogel. Digitization and Pre-Purchase Information: The Causal and Welfare Impacts of Reviews and Crowd Ratings. 2020. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w26776.pdf（663KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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