What Are We Building?
Explore how our behavioral experiments reveal the mechanisms needed to combat misleading product claims in digital marketplaces.
Our Mission: Combating Misleading Product Claims
Building accountability mechanisms for honest e-commerce advertising.
Digital marketplaces like Amazon, Alibaba, and eBay are “two-sided platforms” where sellers advertise products and buyers make purchasing decisions. However, sellers often make misleading claims about product quality, features, or benefits to attract buyers. Our research focuses on creating mechanisms that hold sellers accountable for their advertising claims, protecting consumers from deceptive practices that lead to poor purchasing decisions and market inefficiencies.
Goal:Design interventions that ensure honest advertising in digital marketplaces, rebuilding consumer trust and market integrity.
How Our E-commerce Marketplace Works
Real human participants simulate buying and selling with advertising claims.
Our platform bridges economic theory and user interface design, allowing us to study complex marketplace challenges through human participant interactions in a gamified online simulation of real-world e-commerce conditions.
🧍♀️ Consumer Experience
Watch how buyers navigate product advertisements and make purchasing decisions in our marketplace simulation.
- Browse product advertisements and evaluate claims
- Make purchasing decisions within budget constraints
- Challenge sellers if they believe claims are misleading
- Rate sellers after purchases to build reputation systems
- Learn from experience to avoid deceptive advertisements
🏭 Producer Experience
See how sellers create advertisements and manage their reputation in our experimental platform.
- Create product advertisements with quality claims
- Set quality levels and pricing strategies
- Choose to warrant their claims with financial backing
- Face consequences for misleading advertisements
- Build reputation through honest business practices
Just like real e-commerce platforms, our marketplace includes reputation systems, product reviews, and now introduces “Truth Warrants” as an innovative accountability mechanism.
Experimental Design:
Participants are randomly assigned to buyer or seller roles, creating authentic market dynamics where real human psychology and decision-making drive the outcomes.
Participants are randomly assigned to buyer or seller roles, creating authentic market dynamics where real human psychology and decision-making drive the outcomes.
Gamification of Interventions
Gamify economic interventions for realistic modeling of advertising and purchasing behavior by participants.
Interactive Experiments
Our marketplace is interactive and real-time so participants can play in versus mode, simulating real-life advertising.
Replicable Behavioral Economics Research
Our Research Process in Four Steps
2500 +
Participants
3000 +
Games Played
5 +
GenAI Models
Credits
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