Preprint
Article

Does Product Quality Signal Improve the Information Matching Efficiency of the Sponsored Search Auction Mechanism?

Altmetrics

Downloads

196

Views

99

Comments

0

This version is not peer-reviewed

Submitted:

17 April 2020

Posted:

20 April 2020

You are already at the latest version

Alerts
Abstract
This article investigates the information matching efficiency of the sponsored auction mechanism of search engine platform by implementing consumer purchase strategy. Then we examine the incentive mechanism for sellers to report product quality truthfully under information asymmetry and the reason how product quality signal could improve information matching efficiency of the sponsored auction mechanism. Using the data collected from Baidu search engine, we empirically test the theoretical research results. Our main research finding: under information asymmetry and without product quality signal mechanism, the equilibrium of bidding rank cannot match the consumer purchase strategy at all, causing the consumer welfare to suffer double losses due to the adverse selection of sellers. In the contrast, the search engine could improve partially the information matching efficiency of the sponsored search auction mechanism by identifying the product quality signal brought by the sellers with the highest product quality. However, the search engine has no incentive to design product quality signal for sellers.
Keywords: 
Subject: Business, Economics and Management  -   Economics
Copyright: This open access article is published under a Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license, which permit the free download, distribution, and reuse, provided that the author and preprint are cited in any reuse.
Prerpints.org logo

Preprints.org is a free preprint server supported by MDPI in Basel, Switzerland.

Subscribe

© 2024 MDPI (Basel, Switzerland) unless otherwise stated