earticle

영어

Information cascade and overload have followed with the recent growth of online commerce platforms. Yet, increased spare time due to the isolated lifestyle during the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a unique opportunity for consumers to seek and consume online content with more cognitive effort than before. This study examines how the bias between perceived value and true value changes with a surge of search time created by the quarantine period. Using more than 3 million transaction data pertaining to the daily prices of about 7,800 soccer player cards of two entire seasons spanning the three years of 2018-2020 from the online FIFA, we find that expensive best-quality players become less popular during the pandemic period. In other words, the “superstar effects” seem to disappear when more search time becomes available for consumers. We also find that the prices of “second-best” players (i.e., players in the 3rd and 4th quintiles of the performance ranking) increase, implying that consumers substitute towards good-quality bargains from the top-notch players. Our findings suggest that when consumers have more search time, they gauge the true quality of products more carefully and purchase good-quality bargains such as the “second-best” players. We contribute to the literature by considering circumstance factors in search costs, such as time-oriented dimensions, rather than technical perspectives, and by highlighting the pivotal role of search time in terms of finding true value in the products.