The Online Auction Market in China - A Comparative Study between Taobao and eBay

摘要

The success of the online consumer-to-consumer auction is largely owing to the widely accepted online reputation system. In particular, studying the fast growing online auction markets in China, a country with the largest population in the world, will provide the important outcomes in revealing the trend of global electronic market. Encouraged by the previous research achievement on eBay's online reputation system, this paper is intended to report the research findings on the online auction market in China using the online reputation data collected from Taobao - a Chinese version of online auction marketplace. By comparing between the data from Taobao and eBay we found that the distribution of Chinese online traders' 6-month reputation scores is lognormal; both negative feedback rates and neutral feedback rates of Taobao's reputation data are also ' lognormally distributed - the same as that of eBay - These are the same as the reputation score distributions in eBay. However, the higher neutral scores in Taobao indicate the difference in the cultural aspect contrasting to that of eBay.