It has been hypothesized that the online medium and the Internet lower search costs and that electronic markets are more competitive than conventional markets. This suggests that price dispersion - the distribution of prices of an item indicated by measures such as range and standard deviation -...

Frictionless e-commerce implies that price dispersion for identical products sold by different e-tailers should be smaller than it is offline, but some recent empirical evidence reveals the opposite. A study by Smith et al. (2000) suggests that such a phenomenon may be due to heterogeneity among...

Despite claims that electronic commerce lowers search costs dramatically, and therefore makes it easy for consumers to spot the best buy, empirical studies have found a substantial degree of price dispersion in electronic markets for consumer goods. This study investigates the consumer welfare...

This series of discussions presents commentaries and a response on the impact the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 has had on brand nutritional quality and taste as raised in Moorman et al. (Moorman C, Ferraro R, Huber J (2012) Unintended nutrition consequences: Firm responses to the...

While the Internet has apparently become a major source of information about many items, including real estate, travel, computer equipment, books, records, and automobiles, little is known about how it is used, and about its impact on search behavior. The objective of this study is to shed light...

Why does Amazon.com make low or no profits, whereas, its bricks-and-mortar rival Borders makes substantially higher profits? Why is price dispersion high in certain categories and low in others? Why are prices for the same item higher at bricks-and-mortar retailers than they are at pure play...

The explosive growth in Internet retailing has sparked a stream of research on online price dispersion, defined as the distribution of prices (such as range and standard deviation) of an item with the same measured characteristics across sellers of the item at a given point in time. In this...

Consumers’ time allocation decisions among various activities are fundamental to marketing research and consumer behavior. We construct a dynamic panel data model to examine how consumers allocate time to a portfolio of leisure activities over time. Our data comprise a longitudinal panel where...