Efficiency of antiquarian bookshops in informationally complete markets

This paper proposes a new methodology for the assessment of quality and benchmarking of antiquarian bookshops. The methodology reflects current trends in this specific market, where, in particular, the most influential factor is the Internet, which changed the structure of this market from a locally oligopolistic structure closer to the perfect competition model. However, though the Internet allowed for the competition in prices, there are several further aspects determining the quality of a bookshop. In our AHP-based methodology, we combine both the traditional bookshop-specific criteria (such as opening hours) with those measuring the new features resulting from the public open-access database of all books in stock. We present a case study of antiquarian bookshops in Prague, Czech Republic. The case study illustrates not only the insight into the structure of this market, but also demonstrates that the methodology is useful in the management of bookshops, enabling a bookshop to determine its market position among competitors. The main findings support the hypothesis that quality web services are essential as the pricing policy, which distinguishes the market from its previous locally oligopolistic phase. We also confirm the results of the case study by a robustness analysis showing that the possible subjectivity of experts plays a minor role since we would need large changes in weights of criteria to alter the resulting ranking.