Shrouded Attributes and Information Suppression: Evidence from the Field

We use field and natural experiments in online auctions to study the revenue effect of varying the level and disclosure of shipping charges. Our main findings are (1) disclosure affects revenues—for low shipping charges, a seller is better off disclosing; and (2) increasing shipping charges boosts revenues when these charges are hidden. These results are not explained by changes in the number of bidders.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  Quarterly Journal of Economics

• Publication date

  2010-05-01

• Fields of study

  Economics

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1162/QJEC.2010.125.2.859
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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