Showing 1 - 10 of 625
Platform marketplaces can potentially steer buyers to certain sellers by recommending or guaranteeing those sellers. Money-back guarantees—which create a direct financial stake for the platform in seller performance—might be particularly effective at steering, as they align buyer and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013323442
Data on sales of memory modules are used to explore several aspects of e-retail demand. There is a strong relationship between e-retail sales to a given state and sales tax rates that apply to purchases from online retailers. This suggests that there is substantial substitution between online...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012752281
I study how online competition, with its algorithmic pricing technologies and the transparency of the Internet, can change the pricing behavior of large retailers and affect aggregate inflation dynamics. In particular, I show that online competition has raised both the frequency of price changes...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012909857
I study the positive relationship between prices of tradable goods and per-capita income. I develop a highly tractable general equilibrium model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and non-homothetic consumer preferences that positively links prices of tradables to consumer income....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013139751
Do prices respond to macro shocks? Does the mere presence of international frontiers hinder trade? We revisit these questions by studying a dataset of online book prices for a number of US and Canadian retailers. We believe our dataset is well suited to this task for a number of reasons: (1)...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013149293
We review major changes in the economics of the US retail sector over the past 15-20 years and discuss what these portend for the future evolution of retail. The sector has been shrinking in relative size over the long term, though this stopped around the onset of the Great Recession. Retail has...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013017493
We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using data from the eBay marketplace. Our first approach exploits the fact that seller locations are revealed only after buyers have expressed interest in an item by clicking on its listing. We use millions of location...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013036948
Online prices are increasingly being used for a variety of inflation measurement and research applications, yet little is know about their relation to prices collected offline, where most retail transactions take place. This paper presents the results of the first large-scale comparison of...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10012995509
This paper studies the dollarization of prices in retail markets of emerging economies. We develop a model of the firm’s optimal currency choice in retail markets in inflationary economies. We derive theoretical predictions regarding the optimality of dollar pricing, and test them using data...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014094629
We investigate whether the first digit of an odometer reading is more salient to consumers than subsequent digits. We find that retail transaction prices and volumes of used vehicles drop discontinuously at 10,000-mile odometer thresholds, echoing effects found in the wholesale market by...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10013225007