Local Search Quality: Comment on Product Quality and Entering Through Tying: Experimental Evidence

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Millet, Fabien Curto; Lewis, Stephen; Stoddart, Paul
• 署名单位: Alphabet Inc.; Google Incorporated
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2021.4276
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 3169-3174
• 关键词: industrial organization; market structure; Firm strategy; market performance; TECHNOLOGY; Google; Yelp

摘要

Kim and Luca (2019) consider Google's grouped results for local businesses (the OneBox). They contend that Google made a strategic decision to exclude reviews from other platforms (like Yelp) in these results and claim that this led to a quality degradation for search users, based on a randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiment. The purpose of this Comment is to clarify the robustness of Kim and Luca's characterization of the situation and empirical findings, including in particular with respect to the noise and likely bias resulting from the control benchmark for the RCT experiment being based on a degraded version of Google's OneBox, rather than the actual version.