What Do Women Want? The Economy of Daily Deals

Kathryn Vasilaky, TroopSwap Inc

To evaluate the impact of the daily deals model on buying behavior, we exploit the randomized display of a purchase counter that aggregates real time purchases on a daily deals site. In particular, we look at heterogeneous effects of the purchase counter by gender, given that 60 of our users are female, and 80\% of our active user base is female. Compared to females who do not see the counter, females who do see the counter are 50 percent more likely to make a daily deals purchase controlling for the category, price, and user's tenure on the site, while the effects of the counter on male's purchasing behavior are not statistically significant.