Business Commons^™

Double Learning Or Double Blinding: An Investigation Of Vendor Private Information Acquisition And Consumer Learning Via Online Reviews, Nan Hu, Kevin E. Dow, Alain Yee Loong Chong, Ling Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, building upon information acquisition theory and using portfolio methods and system equations, we made an empirical investigation into how online vendors and consumers are learning from each other, and how online reviews, prices, and sales interact among each other. First, this study shows that vendors acquire information from both private and public channels to learn the quality of their products to make price adjustment. Second, for the more popular products and newly released products, vendors are more motivated to acquire private information that is more precise than the average precision to adjust their price. Third, we document …