Shuffling as a Sales Tactic: An Experimental Study of Selling Product Rankings

We investigate the strategic interaction between a product expert and a consumer. The expert publicly commits to a ranking methodology to rank two products with uncertain relative merits; the consumer decides whether to acquire the ranking report to guide her product choice. The expert cares only about selling the report; the consumer derives utility from the product itself and an extra ranking attribute controlled by the expert. Strategic shuffling, in which the expert induces demand for his report by manipulating the uncertainty in product rankings, emerges as an equilibrium phenomenon. When the consumer highly values the top-ranked product, the expert-optimal equilibrium, which features shuffling, diverges from the consumer-optimal equilibrium. Laboratory evidence supports the predictions of the expert-optimal equilibrium. With limited field data because of the proprietary nature of ranking methodologies, our study provides useful alternative evidence on how ranking publishers may adopt methodologies that are not in consumers’ best interests. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: This work was supported by the Office of the Vice President and Associate Provost for Research and Graduate Studies at Lehigh University [Faculty Research Grant 606975] and the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Key Project 72033006]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02088 .