Market share and warranty costs for renewable warranty programs

A majority of consumer products is associated with some type of warranty. The nature and extent of the warranty affect the sales, market share, costs and profits of many businesses. A warranty can be defined as an assurance from a seller to a buyer that the product sold is guaranteed to perform satisfactorily up to certain length of time, which is the warranty period. In case of product failure within the warranty period, it is assumed that the seller will conform to a rebate policy. In this paper the rebate policy is selected to be linear pro-rata or lump sum. The paper investigates warranty programs that offer customers the option to renew warranty, after an initial period, for a certain premium. The effect of such programs on market share and warranty costs is explored.     

Seller reputation: From word-of-mouth to centralized feedback

Reputation is one of the most important incentives for trade and cooperation. Using the complete selling history of 125,135 sellers on Eachnet.com (an eBay equivalent in China), we show that sellers with a longer successful selling record enjoyed more repeat business, reached more buyer regions, sold in more product categories, and had a higher completion rate even before Eachnet introduced a centralized feedback system. Since the centralized feedback system, the difference between reputable and non-reputable sellers has decreased in terms of repeat business but enlarged in terms of market expansion. These findings suggest that while reputation can facilitate trade through buyer experience and word-of-mouth, it is not as effective as centralized feedback. Our study also shows that, although completion rate and transaction price are the two outcomes most often examined in the literature, seller reputation is important for buyer clientele, market reach, business scope and market survival.     

Assessing the Market Value of Real Estate Property with a Geographically Weighted Stochastic Frontier Model

In this study we consider the problem of sellers, buyers and real estate appraisers in determining the price for a house, taking into account the characteristics of the house and its location as well as the goals of these three different parties. The appraiser's job is to determine the fair market value of the house, while the buyer and seller want to find, respectively, the lowest and highest feasible price for it. We combine recent developments in geography and econometrics to develop an approach that determines local estimates of property values from the perspectives of the buyer, seller and appraiser, taking into account the characteristics of the house as well as its location. We illustrate our approach analyzing closing prices in one residential real estate market.     

Does a Seller’s eCommerce Reputation Matter? Evidence from eBay Auctions

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 significant, but small impact on the price.     

Price Strategies for Idiosyncratic Goods—The Case of Housing

We determine the mechanism that a rational, profit-maximizing seller would use to revise his reservation price for a heterogeneous or infrequently exchanged good. For instance, while one dimension of a home's quality may be easily determined in competitive markets (e.g., the valuation of floor size, location, etc.), other dimensions of quality may be idiosyncratic (unit specific) and unobservable by the seller (e.g., aesthetics of the home). Here, a seller of a new or infrequently exchanged housing unit may use sales success information to revise his expectation of the unit's market-determined value and hence revise his reservation price. The rational seller will, upon arrival of the first buyer inspecting the unit, determine a sequence of reservation prices for this and expected subsequent buyers. This price sequence falls for subsequent buyers and starts from a lower initial price if the first buyer arrives later than expected. Through this mechanism, we offer an explanation for price dispersion and vacancy durations in housing markets. While we explicitly model the real estate market here, this price revision mechanism is also applicable to rental markets, labor markets, used car markets, and other markets characterized by heterogeneity and infrequent sales.     

The Strategic Role of Listing Price in Marketing Real Estate: Theory and Evidence

The seller of a real estate property and his broker have two primary goals: to sell the properly for as high a price as possible and as quickly as possible. While these are separate objectives, they are closely related through the listing price of the seller. The listing price affects how long it takes to find a buyer (i.e., Time On the Market = TOM), and TOM influences the price that results from the bargaining between the seller and the buyer. This leaves the seller and his agent with an important question: What is the optimal price to be asked for the property? The objective of this research is to provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of listing price on TOM and the transaction price.     

FINANCIAL VALUE OF REPUTATION: EVIDENCE FROM THE eBAY AUCTIONS OF GMAIL INVITATIONS*

In this article, I utilize a unique collection of auctions on eBay to study the influence of seller reputation on auction outcomes. In a market of homogeneous goods with non‐enforceable contracts, I find that sellers who improve their reputation by one quintile from the lowest, experience a 6.2% higher probability of sale and a 6.1% hike in valuation after adjusting for truncation bias from failed auctions and explicitly controlling for unobservable seller heterogeneity. This study also shows that in addition to a dimension of reputation universal across different product markets, the product‐specific dimension of reputation significantly affects the auction outcomes.     

Role of resource gap and value appropriation: effect of reputation gap on price premium in online auctions

In this study, we draw on the resource‐based view of the firm and on value‐based models of strategy to examine when firms appropriate value from their superior resources. We argue for the need to take into account the role of the resource gap between competitors rather than the absolute resource stock of the focal firm when examining the resource‐performance relationship. In particular, we investigate whether the ability of a reputable seller to command a price premium is influenced by the reputation gap (i.e., the reputation differences between the focal seller and its closest competitor standardized by the reputation stock of both sellers). We test our hypotheses on 72 matched pairs of online transactions screened from more than 2,000 auctions of new mobile phones on the Polish Internet auction site Allegro. We find that the ability of a reputable seller to command a price premium (1) increases with the size of the reputation gap between the focal seller and its matched competitor, and (2) becomes increasingly smaller for each additional unit of the seller reputation gap. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A Simple Search and Bargaining Model of Real Estate Markets

This paper examines the impact of brokers on buyers' and sellers' search behavior and on the transaction prices in real estate markets. It is shown that the seller and the buyer search less intensively if the house is listed with a broker. The seller gets a higher price when he employs a broker, but the increase in price is smaller than the commission fee. More specifically, the portion of the commission covered by the increase in price is directly related to the bargaining powers of the buyer and the seller. In the special case where the price is determined according to the Nash bargaining solution, the increase in price is shown to be half of the commission fee. It is also shown that an increase in the commission rate increases the equilibrium price but decreases the equilibrium search intensities.     

A Spatiotemporal Solution for the Simultaneous Sale Price and Time‐on‐the‐Market Problem

There exists an important methodological challenge when dealing with sale price and time‐on‐the‐market variables because both variables are simultaneously determined and related to the motivation of the sellers and buyers. Exploiting the fact that transactions occur over space and time, we propose a two‐stage approach based on instrumental variables (IV) built from information collected from previous transactions. The unidirectional temporal property and the fact that other transactions are exogenous from the perspective of a single buyer or seller are exploited to evaluate the effect of the sale price on time‐on‐the‐market, and the effect of time‐on‐the‐market on the sale price. Based on 29,471 transactions occurring in the suburban neighborhood of Montréal (1992‐2000), the results suggest that, everything else being equal, houses staying longer on the market provide negative information to the market, which results in a lower final sale price, while the final sale price is negatively related to time‐on‐the‐market, indicating that houses of better quality (better amenities) stay less time on the market.     

Exclusionary discounts

We consider a two-period model with two sellers and one buyer. Although we assume it is efficient for the buyer to purchase from both sellers in each period, we show that when the buyer's valuations are inter-temporally linked and at least one seller is financially constrained, exclusion can sometimes arise in equilibrium (i.e., the buyer purchases all of its requirements from the same seller in each period). The exclusionary equilibria are supported by contract offers in which the excluding seller's incremental price to supply the contestable part of demand is below its marginal cost and sometimes negative. Our findings contribute to the literatures on market-share contracts, bundling, all-units discounts, and loyalty discounts.     

ADVERSE SELECTION IN ELECTRONIC MARKETS: EVIDENCE FROM ONLINE STAMP AUCTIONS

We analyze adverse selection costs in online stamp auctions, based on a comparison of prices on eBay with those of matched stamps at a specialty stamps auction site in the U.S., Michael Rogers, Inc. (MR), which we know a priori has low quality uncertainty. We find that buyer prices are 10–15% lower on eBay as compared to MR, and the price difference, increases with the value of the stamps. Consistent with this adverse selection discount we find that the seller reputation mechanism on eBay has an economically modest, although statistically significant, effect on auction price and probability of sale.     

Price Dispersion and Price Discrimination: Empirical Evidence from a Spot Market for Water

This note shows the existence of price dispersion and pricediscrimination in a spot market for water.Several behaviors contributing to this dispersion/discrimination arefound for both the seller and buyer in this relatively competitive market,and examples are given of each. Using some previous theoretical work,the common thread linking the differing behaviors is shown to bediffering levels of information and search costs.     

Deed Types, House Prices and Mortgage Interest Rates

When houses are sold they come with a deed attached that spells out the legal guarantees on good title. Some deeds give clues about the characteristics of the seller or the house. Using a 37,043-observation house price hedonic with a Bayesian spatial error model, we find the type of deed attached to a housing sale can have a dramatic correlation with the sale price. Ten deed types command a discount, and one commands a premium relative to warranty deeds. Mortgage rates for sheriff's deeds and foreclosure deeds are lower than for warranty deeds, indicating more sophisticated buyers.     

Reputation and prices on the e-market: Evidence from a major French platform

We use an exhaustive data set from one of France's largest e-commerce platforms, PriceMinister.com, to estimate a statistical causal effect of a seller's reputation (rating and size) on transaction prices. We go beyond the results currently available by tackling the issue of seller unobserved heterogeneity and the dynamics of reputation in price equations. We can also produce results for a large range of product categories (books, CDs, video games or DVDs), product conditions (used or new) and seller types (individual or professional sellers). Our results show large-scale empirical evidence of a significant, positive and strong effect of seller reputation on prices.     

Buyer power and exclusion in vertically related markets

Suppliers and consumer organizations have become increasingly concerned by the build-up of buyer power of retailers in many markets. A major concern is that strong retailers will abuse their power to exclude products and rival retailers from the market to be able to increase prices to consumers. As a consequence, remedies to limit buyer power are discussed and implemented in many countries. In this paper we compare the incentives for exclusion, and the effect on consumers prices, under both buyer and seller power. We study a model with a dominant upstream manufacturer and a competitive fringe of producers offering their products to two differentiated downstream retailers. We compare the equilibrium outcome of this model when i) the dominant supplier holds all the bargaining power, and (ii) the retailers have all the bargaining power. We show that full or partial exclusion of either the competitive product or downstream retailers occurs when inter and intrabrand competition are strong. This is true both under seller and buyer power. However, in contrast to the received literature, we find that buyer power weakly enhances welfare compared to seller power because buyer power will lead to both more product variety (less exclusion) and lower retail prices.     

电煤市场中买方市场集中度对均衡价格的影响分析

几乎所有的文献都从"市场煤"与"计划电"的体制矛盾入手分析电煤价格持续上涨及发电企业经营困难的主要原因与相关对策。作者认为,在近年来电煤市场供求总量基本平衡的前提下,电煤市场价格持续大幅度上涨与发电企业买方市场集中度有关。本文运用讨价还价模型,分析了买方市场集中度变化即改单一发电企业购煤为发电集团公司统一购煤甚至多家发电集团公司统一购煤对电煤均衡价格的影响。结果表明:提高买方市场集中度能有效降低电煤市场均衡价格。     

A decision model for adopting an extended warranty under different maintenance policies

Numerous products are sold with a warranty period and the possibility of buying an extended warranty for a given additional cost. The buyer has then to decide to take the extended warranty or not when purchasing the product. We develop in this paper a mathematical model to study the opportunity provided by the extended warranty for the buyer as well as for the manufacturer. The total average cost incurred by each side during the product’s life cycle is expressed in order to determine the maximum extra cost the consumer should pay and the minimum price at which the manufacturer should sell the extended warranty. This is done under different options in terms of maintenance strategies adopted during the product’s lifecycle.     

Optimal reserve prices in sealed-bid auctions with reference effects

The reference effect and loss aversion are incorporated into the buyer’s utility in the symmetric independent private value models of sealed-bid auctions. The buyer’s equilibrium bidding strategy and the seller’s optimal reserve price are derived for the first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions. In both auction mechanisms, the seller’s optimal reserve price and expected revenue are increasing in the reference point. We compare the seller’s expected revenues as well as the optimal reserve prices in the two auctions. The results show that the seller will set a higher optimal reserve price but obtain lower optimal expected revenue in the second-price auction compared to the first-price auction. Further, we extend the model to the gain-seeking case, and endogenize the reference point as the ex-ante expected price of the item in equilibrium. In contrast to the loss-averse case, the seller will set a lower optimal reserve price but obtain higher optimal expected revenue in the second-price auction compared to the first-price auction if the buyers are gain-seeking. With an endogenous reference point, similar results are obtained in terms of revenue comparison between the two auctions.     

When Do Large Buyers Pay Less? Experimental Evidence

The rise of mega‐retailers has precipitated a growing literature on large‐buyer discounts. According to Rotemberg and Saloner [1986] and Snyder [1998], large buyers' ability to obtain price discounts depends on their relative size and the degree of seller competition. I test experimentally implications of this theory concerning the number of sellers and the sizes of buyers in the market. The results track the comparative‐statics predictions to a surprising extent. Subtle changes in the buyer‐size distribution or number of sellers can create or negate large‐buyer discounts. The results highlight the previously unexplored role of the demand structure in determining buyer‐size discounts.