Price Setting in Online Markets: Does IT Click? / Yuriy Gorodnichenko, Viacheslav Sheremirov, Oleksandr Talavera.

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Gorodnichenko, Yuriy

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Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w20819.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

E3 - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles

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Abstract: Using a unique dataset of daily U.S. and U.K. price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform, we shed new light on how prices are set in online markets, which have a number of special properties such as low search costs, low costs of monitoring competitors' prices, and low costs of nominal price adjustment. We document that although online prices are more flexible than offline prices, they continue to exhibit relatively long spells of fixed prices, large size and low synchronization of price changes, considerable cross-sectional dispersion, and low sensitivity to predictable or unanticipated changes in demand conditions. Qualitatively these patterns are similar to those observed for offline prices, which calls for more research on the sources of price rigidities and dispersion.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w20819 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

Total holds: 0

December 2014.

Using a unique dataset of daily U.S. and U.K. price listings and the associated number of clicks for precisely defined goods from a major shopping platform, we shed new light on how prices are set in online markets, which have a number of special properties such as low search costs, low costs of monitoring competitors' prices, and low costs of nominal price adjustment. We document that although online prices are more flexible than offline prices, they continue to exhibit relatively long spells of fixed prices, large size and low synchronization of price changes, considerable cross-sectional dispersion, and low sensitivity to predictable or unanticipated changes in demand conditions. Qualitatively these patterns are similar to those observed for offline prices, which calls for more research on the sources of price rigidities and dispersion.