Hide or Embrace Drawbacks? - A Quantitative Study of the Impact of Two-Sided Messaging in the Online Secondary Marketplace Setting

Abstract: In recent years, online secondary marketplace platforms have experienced rapid growth as both sustainability concerns and the demand for second-hand products have increased substantially. Despite this considerable growth, second-hand marketplaces have remained relatively understudied. This thesis aims to quantitively investigate how one-sided and two-sided messaging affects consumer behaviour at Facebook Marketplace, one of the world's largest secondary marketplace platforms, using intention as a determinant. Two-sided messaging is messaging containing both positive and negative information. Previous findings on two-sided messaging and showed a positive relationship to purchase intention. This thesis investigates the relationship between two-sided messaging and purchase intention using an experiment in the form of a self-completion questionnaire. The respondents were randomly divided into two different subject groups (one-sided versus two-sided) where they were exposed to a fictive Facebook Marketplace listing. Results show that two-sided messaging produces a higher level of purchase intention compared to the use of one-sided positive messaging. This indicates that presenting drawbacks in a product description is an effective tactic in the consumer-to-consumer context.