Collaborative Paper by Assistant Researcher Liu Jinliang Published in JEBO, Top Journal in Behavioral and Organizational Economics

Recently, the collaborative paper The Impacts of Return Policies and Perception Heterogeneity on Sales Platforms for Experience Goods: An Experimental Study by Assistant Researcher Liu Jinliang from the School of Economics at Shandong University and doctoral student Xu Yongzhi from the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University, USA, was published online in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, an international top journal in behavioral and organizational economics.

With the rapid development of the digital economy, the experience goods market occupies an important position in online sales platforms. Compared with traditional goods, the real value of experience goods can only be determined after purchase. This characteristic makes consumers face greater uncertainty in decision-making and affects the pricing and transaction behaviors of buyers and sellers on the platform. To alleviate this uncertainty, many platforms implement mandatory no-reason return policies, requiring sellers to provide return options without independent choice.

Through economic experiments, this paper systematically separates and examines the impacts of two key factors in the online trading platform of experience goods for the first time: "the implementation of no-reason return policy" and "the degree of consumers' cognitive differences in the value distribution of experience goods" on the behaviors of buyers and sellers. The study finds that under certain conditions, the mandatory no-reason return policy will significantly reduce sellers' pricing, and the greater the potential difference in consumers' valuation of experience goods, the more obvious the price decline and the higher the return rate. The experimental results also show that the mandatory no-reason return policy does not significantly improve consumer welfare while reducing sellers' profits, revealing the potential improvement space for return policy design in online sales platforms.

Liu Jinliang is an assistant researcher at the School of Economics at Shandong University. He obtained his Ph.D. from the Department of Economics at Texas A&M University, USA in 2024. His research directions include behavioral and experimental economics, information economics and mechanism design. His research achievements have been published in journals such as Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization and he serves as an anonymous reviewer for many international journals. He presided over the Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province.