Price comparison websites, where consumers can compare prices at a search cost that is close to zero, have become … the Swedish price comparison website PriceSpy on prices and price dispersion. We find that increased use by consumers … approximately 2.9 billion SEK. Reduced prices due to increased use of the price comparison website thus resulted in total potential …

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 over time; however, they are more stable among stations at the …

This paper identifies patterns of cross-sectional and temporal price dispersion-in the Spanish online grocery retail …. Our results show that price dispersion is still present (albeit to a lesser extent) even after controlling for chain … using price data while accounting for vertical product differentiation. The analysis suggests that the extent of search is …

In a recent paper Hong and Shum [2006. Using price distributions to estimate search costs. Rand Journal of Economics 37 … to the firms: Despite more than 20 firms operating in each of the markets, we estimate price-cost margins to be around 25 …