Title: The Impact of Crowd-Based Adjudication on Transaction Behavior: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

Speaker: Associate Professor Gen Li, Department of Information Management and Business Intelligence

Time: May 19, 2026, 1:30-2:30 p.m.

Venue: Guoshun Campus, Li Dak Sum Building, Room 105

Abstract:

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) marketplaces frequently face disputes between buyers and sellers, particularly on secondhand trading platforms where product quality is difficult to verify and formal enforcement mechanisms are limited. To address these challenges, platforms have introduced crowd-based adjudication systems that allow users to serve as peer jurors in dispute resolution. We examine how participation in such systems affects users' subsequent transactional behavior. Exploiting a natural experiment in which the platform introduced a peer-based adjudication system that allows users to serve as jurors, and employing a staggered difference-in-differences design on a matched sample of jurors and non-jurors, we find that juror participation leads to a 19% increase in transaction volume relative to comparable non-jurors. We provide evidence that social learning is a key mechanism underlying this spillover effect. Additional analyses show that this effect is stronger for users who engage more intensively in the adjudication process. Our study offers practical implications for platform design, suggesting that involving users in adjudication roles can foster more active participation beyond dispute resolution.