Information systems and the Internet have facilitated the creation of used product markets that feature a dramatically wider selection, lower search costs, and lower prices than their brick-andmortar counterparts do. The increased viability of these used product markets has caused concern among...

Commentators have observed that the ease of monitoring competitors on the Internet may allow Internet retailers to engage in non-competitive pricing. Using data on the daily prices of 399 books at 26 online bookstores between August 1999 and January 2000, we investigate firm pricing behavior in...

Price dispersion among commodity goods is typically attributed to consumer search costs. This paper explores the magnitude of consumer search benefits and costs using a data set obtained from a major Internet shopbot. For the median consumer, the benefits to searching lower screens are $6.55...

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a new nearly "frictionless market." Our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs. Using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected...