These Deals Won't Last! Longevity, Uniformity and Bias in Product Badge Assignment in E-Commerce Platforms

Product badges are ubiquitous in e-commerce platforms, acting as effective psychological triggers to nudge customers to buy specific products, boosting revenues. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been no attempt to systematically study these badges and their several idiosyncrasies - we intend to close this gap in our current work. Specifically, we try to answer questions such as: How long does a product retain a badge on a given platform? If a product is sold on different platforms, then does it receive similar badges? How do the products that receive badges differ from those which do not, in terms of price, customer rating, etc. We collect longitudinal data from several e-commerce platforms over 45 days, and find that although most of the badges are short-lived, there are several permanent badge assignments and that too for badges meant to denote urgency or scarcity. Furthermore, it is unclear how the badge assignments are done, and we find evidence that highly-rated products are missing out on badges compared to lower quality ones. Our work calls for greater transparency in the badge assignment process to inform customers, as well as to reduce dissatisfaction among the sellers dependent on the platforms for their revenues.