We present a model in which price dispersion allows long run increasing returns to scale to emerge from a competitive short run. The model hinges upon turnover in the productive technology-leading firm, price dispersion resultant of Stigler's logic of rational search and limited excludability of...

We investigate the effect of competition on price dispersion in the airline industry. Using panel data from 1993 to 2008, we find a non-monotonic effect of competition on price dispersion. An increase in competition is associated with greater price dispersion in concentrated markets but is...

This paper studies the role of imperfect information in explaining price dispersion. We use a new panel dataset on the U.S. retail gasoline industry, and propose a new test of temporal price dispersion to establish the importance of consumer search. We show that price rankings vary significantly...

REVISED: 8/1/18: We use a large data set on retail pricing to document that a sizable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set...

This article uses networks to study price dispersion in seller-buyer markets where buyers with unit demand interact with multiple, but not all, sellers; and buyers and sellers compete on prices after they meet. The central finding of this article is that price dispersion is determined by the...

Collecting information on prices is a costly endeavor. The cost depends on the relative ease with which those prices can be collected, and in many retail gasoline markets, there is a substantial divide in the ease of collecting information with regular grade gasoline on one side of the divide...

We analyze price dispersion using panel data from a large price comparison site. We use past pricing behavior to instrument for potential endogeneity that might result from the selection of firms to certain product markets. We find that greater price adjustment costs result in greater price...

This paper models and estimates the gasoline price dispersion across time and space by introducing and using a unique gasoline price data set at the gas-station level within the U.S.. Nationwide effects (measured by time fixed effects or crude oil prices) explain up to about 51% of the gasoline...

We use a large dataset on retail pricing to document that a sizable portion of the cross-sectional variation in the price at which the same good trades in the same period and in the same market is due to the fact that stores that are, on average, equally expensive set persistently different...

This paper aims at providing an explanation of the observed espresso price dispersion across major Italian cities. The empirical evidence suggests a positive relationships between the average espresso price in a city and the number of coffee shops (normalized for the adult population) operating...