The online auction experience goes sour when bidders receive “lemons” from unscrupulous sellers. Such bidders lose confidence in online auction sellers and become disillusioned with the quality of goods available. At the extreme, “lemons” could precipitate the collapse of a marketplace,
with poor quality goods driving away higher quality products (Akerlof 1970; Ba et al. 2003; Dewan and Hsu 2004; Huston and Spencer 2002).