*Recent evidence suggests online ratings and reviews are intrinsically motivated and reviewers reciprocate offers of sufficient value-for-money with good ratings. We incorporate reciprocity into a model of ratings, where consumers rate positively if they receive a high value-for-money and perceive firms to be sufficiently kind. Our key mechanism is that to benefit from reciprocity, firms offer lower prices in exchange for good ratings, increasing future prices and profits. Firms reinforce this mechanism and are more likely to induce good ratings when i) consumers exhibit a stronger sense of reciprocity or when ii) it is easier for consumers to leave ratings. This way, the presence of reciprocity can explain the documented phenomenon of rating inflation, and less informative ratings, especially as it becomes easier to leave ratings. We discuss how further marketplace features affect the reciprocity mechanism and the informativeness of ratings: First, a two-sided platform might indeed choose to make it easier for consumers to rate, thereby undermining the informativeness of ratings. Second, many platforms screen the quality of sellers and kick out low-quality sellers. We characterize when such quality screening reduces or reinforces the informativeness of ratings. Third, competition between sellers leads to lower informativeness of ratings. Finally, we show that more-informative ratings do not necessarily translate to larger consumer surplus.

**Among European countries Albania has by far the highest sex ratio at birth with 1.12 boys per girls, compared to the European average of 1.058. Considering this disbalance, the aim of this paper is to analyze a mechanism that can lower the sex ratio by implementing policies that eliminate the sex bias in parents preferences for children and the gender gap in intra-household bargaining. We focus on the reasons behind parent’s choice for the sex of their children by considering different preferences for each of them. We try to solve the problematic of sex selective abortion by developing a parsimonious model which incorporates different utilities for boys and girls, the bargaining between family members and the decision about abortion dependent on its cost. We calibrate the model using data of the Demographic and Health Survey dataset on Albania for the year 2008 by measuring the preference for children for both sexes by the time invested in the child, education, violence, and women empowerment by how independent are women in taking decisions. Furthermore we find that if we increase gender empowerment and equalize preference in children sex ratio decreases by 0.04. To conclude we propose different policies that can help in the decline of the sex ratio disparity.