Do Vendors’ Pricing Decisions Fully Reflect Information in Online Reviews?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By using online retail data collected from Amazon, Barnes & Nobel, and Pricegrabber, this paper investigates whether online vendors’ pricing decisions fully reflect the information contained in various components of customers’ online reviews. The findings suggest that there is inefficiency in vendors’ pricing decisions. Specifically, vendors do not appear to fully understand the incremental predictive power of online reviews in forecasting future sales when they adjust their prices. However, they do understand demand persistence. Interestingly, vendors reduce price if the actual demand is higher than the expected demand (positive demand shock). This phenomenon is attributed to the advertising effect suggested in previous literature and the intense competitiveness of e-Commerce. Finally, we document that vendors do not change their prices directly in response to online reviews; their response to online reviews is through forecasting consumer’s future demand.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it