Consumers will purchase goods and services from sellers they trust. This is an idea as old as commerce itself. However, creating, fostering, and increasing that trust in online marketplaces—think Amazon, Uber, and Etsy—presents new challenges and requires different tools. In this video, Steve Tadelis, Professor of Economics and Sarin Chair in Leadership and Strategy at the University of California, Berkley, Haas School of Business, walks viewers through three different ways of increasing consumer confidence on these new platforms. Each takes an engineering approach to economics: creating testable hypotheses and then using data to actually test them. Tadelis, a leading expert on e-commerce and internet economies, draws on the years he spent at eBay, the company that invented the online marketplace. Questrom Associate Professor of Information Systems Andrei Hagiu, who moderates the concluding Q&A session, calls this presentation “mandatory for every marketplace startup.”
Moderated by Peter Howard, Executive Director, Boston University Digital Business Institute
The Boston Digital Leadership Forum at the Questrom School of Business features one well-known digital business leader or thinker every month to discuss our digital future. This month’s leader is Professor Steve Tadelis of UC Berkeley on a topic that is near and dear to many online businesses – how to engineer trust in online marketplaces.