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...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, dis- plays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

The internet has dramatically reduced the cost of varying prices, displays and information provided to consumers, facilitating both active and passive experimentation. We document the prevalence of targeted pricing and auction design variation on eBay, and identify hundreds of thousands of...

Consumer auctions were very popular in the early days of internet commerce, but today online sellers mostly use posted prices. Data from eBay shows that compositional shifts in the items being sold, or the sellers offering these items, cannot account for this evolution. Instead, the returns to...

We document some early effects of how mobile devices might change Internet and retail commerce. We present three main findings based on an analysis of eBay's mobile shopping application and core Internet platform. First, early adopters of mobile e-commerce applications appear to be people who...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using eBay data. Our first approach exploits the fact that a seller's location?and therefore the applicable tax rate?is revealed only after a buyer has expressed interest in an item. We document how adverse tax "surprises"...

Search frictions can explain why the "law of one price" fails in retail markets and why even firms selling commodity products have pricing power. In online commerce, physical search costs are low, yet price dispersion is common. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using data from the eBay marketplace. Our Örst 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...

Search frictions can explain why the "law of one price" fails in retail markets and why even firms selling commodity products have pricing power. In online commerce, physical search costs are low, yet price dispersion is common. We use browsing data from eBay to estimate a model of consumer...

We use data from eBay to identify hundreds of thousands of instances in which retailers posted otherwise identical product listings with targeted variation in pricing and auction design. We use these matched listings to measure the dispersion in auction prices for identical goods sold by the...