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The impact of place-of-origin on price premium for agricultural products: empirical evidence from Taobao.com

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Abstract

The impact of place-of-origin on price premium for agricultural products in the online marketplace has received limited attention in the existing literature. This study draws from the elaboration likelihood model and investigates whether place-of-origin affects price premium. Moreover, this study explores how other cues [seller’s reputation, positive word-of-mouth (WOM) volume, and WOM valence] moderate the relationship between place-of-origin and price premium for agricultural products in the online marketplace. The result of the empirical study reveals that place-of-origin indeed has a significant and positive impact on price premium. Furthermore, the study finds a negative interactive effect between place-of-origin and other cues (seller’s reputation, positive WOM volume, and WOM valence) on the price premium for agricultural products in an e-commerce setting. The results highlight the importance of place-of-origin in the competitive online market and have implications both for academic research and for online retailing practice.

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Notes

  1. The sample size of this part of the dataset is very small, so it had no specific impact on the empirical results of this paper.

  2. Other important variables, such as product-related WOM valence and seller’s reputation, were collected and organized at the weekly level.

  3. We used the price of each product minus the average price to obtain the dependent variable.

  4. The value of the PosWomVolumei,t variable was not derived directly, but was calculated by multiplying by WOM volume and the rate of positive reviews. The rate of positive reviews is mostly near 1, so the values of WOM volume and the positive WOM volume are very close.

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Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges the support of the National Social Sciences Foundation of China (Project 19BGL260) and the Key Research Center of Humanities and Social Sciences in the General Colleges and Universities of Xinjiang Uygar Autonomous Region (Project 050214C04).

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  1. School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, 200433, China

    Xia Li

  2. School of Business Administration, Xinjiang University of Finance and Economics, Ürümqi, 830012, China

    Xia Li

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Li, X. The impact of place-of-origin on price premium for agricultural products: empirical evidence from Taobao.com. Electron Commer Res 22, 561–584 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-020-09404-5

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