Peer-to-Peer Markets with Bilateral Ratings

T. Tony Ke (), Monic Sun () and Baojun Jiang ()
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T. Tony Ke: Department of Marketing, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong
Monic Sun: Department of Marketing, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Baojun Jiang: Department of Marketing, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63130

Marketing Science, 2024, vol. 43, issue 5, 1081-1101

Abstract: Peer-to-peer (P2P) markets have become a critical aspect of the modern economy. We consider a P2P market in which a time-sensitive service is provided through a platform that matches providers of varying qualities to customers of varying costs. The P2P platform features bilateral ratings, which distinguish it from a traditional market: ratings of a provider reveal the provider’s service quality and ratings of a customer reveal the customer’s service cost. The existence of a cost measure in the P2P market leads to novel pricing considerations: a provider can attract low-cost customers by charging a low price, leading to an endogenous composition effect. As a result, equilibrium prices may decrease as customers become more costly to serve or as the platform’s commission rate gets higher. Under certain conditions, high-quality providers may even charge a lower equilibrium price than low-quality providers in order to cherry-pick low-cost customers. Exploratory analysis reveals that, compared with unilateral ratings, bilateral ratings may soften provider competition and raise equilibrium prices as the providers target customers in different cost segments. History: Anthony Dukes served as the senior editor. Funding: This work was supported by the NET Institute (summer research fund). Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2022.0158 .

Keywords: user-generated content; customer reviews; decentralized matching; peer-to-peer market; platform design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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