Interesting Results
Online Price Variations
Comparing prices offered for identical items by different retailers is much faster and easier online than it is offline. Many people speculated that this would lead the prices offered online (and possibly offline too) to converge. However, a recent study shows that this hasn’t happened — at least not yet. The authors examined price quotes from 105 retailers who offer Web-based sales. They got 6739 price quotes for 581 identical products in 8 different product categories (books, CDs, etc.) and found large price differences between retailers. Some of these differences could be explained by services offered (for example, retailers with good shipping and handling policies tended to have higher prices), and whether the quote was from a “pure-play” or “bricks and clicks” retailer (except for books and software, “pure-play” retailers tended to be less expensive), but significant variation remained even after controlling for these factors.