Male sellers on eBay have edge on women, study says
Successful sellers on eBay know certain things matter: item description, appealing photos, strong seller ratings and, of course, price.
Now, a study published Friday in the journal Science suggested another factor might make a subtle difference: whether the seller is a man or woman. Using data supplied by the company, researchers analyzed some 630,000 auction transactions on eBay in the United States and reported that, on average, when men and women with equal selling reputations sold the same products, women received lower prices than men.
The difference was far less pronounced for used items: Women sellers received about 97 cents for every dollar men received. But with new items, where the authors say direct comparison is easier, women received about 80 cents on average for every dollar men sellers received.
“The basic point — that people have different expectations of women versus men, and so we treat them very differently in the world — it’s fascinating and depressing,” said Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who was not involved in the study.
“On eBay, wow,” she added, noting eBay’s fame as a forum where anyone can sell anything. It also does not require that sellers identify their gender.
The study did not paint a universally negative pic-
ture for women. For some items, like toys and pet products, women received somewhat higher prices than men. And women tended to have better reputations as sellers although they tended to have less selling experience.
Nor did the study, which controlled for seller reputation, experience, number of photos and other elements, indicate that buyers were consciously discriminating. Male and female buyers appeared to treat women sellers the same, the authors said.
“We actually think that most of it is unconscious,” said Tamar Kricheli-Katz, a professor of law and sociology at Tel Aviv University, who conducted the study with Tali Regev, an economist at IDC Herzliya. “The fact is that most of us have biases. We hold them unconsciously, and it makes it difficult to change.”
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and expert on gender wage gaps, said the study was intriguing but needed more analysis.
The researchers said eBay allowed them access to data on transactions, sellers and buyers, includ- ing gender. They evaluated transactions from 2009 to 2012, focusing on the 420 most popular items in eBay’s broader categories, and on auctions because no negotiation is involved. Sellers considered to be stores were excluded.
EBay did not provide financing for the study, but set conditions, according to the authors and to editors at Science. The researchers’ contract allowed eBay to approve any study before publication, mostly for potential disclosure of proprietary data and trade secrets; the authors said eBay “ended up approving the study without asking us to drop any of our results.”
A few female sellers said they believed some buyers reacted differently because they were women.
Melanie Fodera, 21, a senior at Albion College in Michigan and a seller for about seven years, said when selling a Detroit Lions jersey for “$100 or best offer,” she was offered $50.
“I countered $ 75, and their message to me was, ‘You don’t know what this is worth because you’re a girl,’ ” said Fodera, who usually sells women’s clothes and has an eBay page decorated with roses.