Elimination by Aspects in Electronic Commerce -- Evidence from Online Marketplace and Implications for Empirical Model Specification

Abstract

Consumers often use heuristics in making online purchase decisions. The use of heuristics could have significant implications on empirical model specifications for ecommerce research. In this study, we consider the effect of decision heuristics in the context of the relationship between seller reputation and product sales in a large scale online marketplace. Our analysis suggests that the data are consistent with consumers' use of Elimination By Aspects (EBA), one of the most well-known heuristics in their purchase decisions. We propose a parsimonious non-linear regression model to account for this heuristic behavior.