Local Search Quality: Comment on “Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence”

Fabien Curto Millet (), Stephen Lewis () and Paul Stoddart ()
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Fabien Curto Millet: Google LLC, Beverly Hills, California 90210
Stephen Lewis: RBB Economics, London EC2M 3TY, United Kingdom
Paul Stoddart: Economic Insight, London EC2N 1AR, United Kingdom

Management Science, 2022, vol. 68, issue 4, 3169-3174

Abstract: Kim and Luca (2019) consider Google’s grouped results for local businesses (the “OneBox”). They contend that Google made a “strategic decision” to exclude reviews from other platforms (like Yelp) in these results and claim that this led to a quality degradation for search users, based on a randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiment. The purpose of this Comment is to clarify the robustness of Kim and Luca’s characterization of the situation and empirical findings, including in particular with respect to the noise and likely bias resulting from the control benchmark for the RCT experiment being based on a degraded version of Google’s OneBox, rather than the actual version.

Keywords: industrial organization; market structure; firm strategy; market performance; technology; Google; Yelp (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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