Understanding the market for remanufactured products: What can we learn from online trading and Web search sites?

Notwithstanding the interest it elicits from academics and practitioners, relatively little is known about the market for remanufactured products. Research, still in its infancy, has focused almost entirely on what affects willingness to pay, and our understanding of other key marketing questions, such as what drives search intensity for remanufactured products or the number of remanufactured products on offer, is limited. This paper fills this knowledge gap. Focusing on the online market for remanufactured electrical and electronic products, we empirically test whether product-specific and market-specific determinants affect search intensity and number of remanufactured products on offer, that is, number of listings. We use as inputs online search traffic, product-specific data collected from various other online sources, and relevant eBay listing data. Our analysis supports the hypotheses that search intensity for remanufactured products is associated with search intensity for, price and elapsed time since the launch of new counterpart products. Number of remanufactured products listed is associated with number of listings for new counterparts and two product-specific characteristics: presence of moving parts, and whether the product is used for personal hygiene. We discuss several implications of our findings for remanufacturers and policy makers as well as directions for future research.