From High Bar to Uneven Bars: The Impact of Information Granularity in Quality Certification

The paper was previously circulated under the title “Mitigating the Cold-start Problem in Reputation Systems: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” The authors thank Francesco Decarolis, Sanjeev Dewan, Dan Elfenbein, Andrey Fradkin, Ginger Jin, Tobias Klein, Meng Liu, Maryam Saeedi, Konrad Stahl, André Stenzel, Tianxin Zou, and many seminar and conference participants at the University of Toronto, Washington University, The Quantitative Marketing and Economics Rossi Seminar, Virtual Quant Marketing Seminar, The Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation 2021 Annual Conference, INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS) Marketing Science Conference, ZEW Conference on the Economics of Information and Communication Technologies, Conference on Information Systems and Technology, Workshop on Information Systems and Economics, and Conference on the Digital Experimentation for helpful discussions and comments. The authors are grateful to eBay for providing access to the data. None of the authors has a financial relationship with eBay.