IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/iuiwop/0559.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Pricing Strategies in E-Commerce: Bricks vs. Clicks

Author

Listed:
  • Friberg, Richard

    (Stockholm School of Economics)

  • Ganslandt, Mattias

    (The Research Institute of Industrial Economics)

  • Sandström, Mikael

    (Swedish Research Institute of Trade (HUI))

Abstract

What is the impact of the increasing dominance of conventional firms in e-commerce? We use a simple model to show that retailers who only sell through Internet have lower on-line prices than retailers who also sell through conventional stores. This proposition is firmly supported by our empirical analysis which uses a rich data set covering the Swedish markets for books and CDs. On average, prices of these goods are 15 percent cheaper on Internet, but if a single item is bought transport costs will make it as expensive to buy over Internet as in a conventional store (if a basket of goods is bought it is some 10 percent cheaper on Internet since transport costs are fixed).

Suggested Citation

  • Friberg, Richard & Ganslandt, Mattias & Sandström, Mikael, 2001. "Pricing Strategies in E-Commerce: Bricks vs. Clicks," Working Paper Series 559, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0559
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ifn.se/Wfiles/wp/WP559.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Dennis W. Carlton & Judith A. Chevalier, 2001. "Free Riding and Sales Strategies for the Internet," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 49(4), pages 441-461, December.
    2. Karen Clay & Ramayya Krishnan & Eric Wolff, 2001. "Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 49(4), pages 521-539, December.
    3. Anderson, Simon P & Ginsburgh, Victor A, 1999. "International Pricing with Costly Consumer Arbitrage," Review of International Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(1), pages 126-139, February.
    4. Fiona Scott Morton & Florian Zettelmeyer & Jorge Silva Risso, 2000. "Internet Car Retailing," NBER Working Papers 7961, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    5. Yannis Bakos, 2001. "The Emerging Landscape for Retail E-Commerce," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 15(1), pages 69-80, Winter.
    6. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2009. "Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(2), pages 427-452, March.
    7. Mussa, Michael & Rosen, Sherwin, 1978. "Monopoly and product quality," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 301-317, August.
    8. Erik Brynjolfsson & Michael D. Smith, 2000. "Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 46(4), pages 563-585, April.
    9. Mark Armstrong, 1999. "Price Discrimination by a Many-Product Firm," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 66(1), pages 151-168.
    10. Asplund, Marcus & Sandin, Rickard, 1999. "Competition in interrelated markets: An empirical study," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 17(3), pages 353-369, April.
    11. Dennis W. Carlton & Judith A. Chevalier, 2001. "Free Riding and Sales Strategies for the Internet," NBER Chapters, in: E-commerce, pages 441-461, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    12. Austan Goolsbee, 2001. "Competition in the Computer Industry," NBER Working Papers 8351, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Friberg, Richard & Ganslandt, Mattias & Sandström, Mikael, 2000. "E-commerce and prices - theory and evidence," SSE/EFI Working Paper Series in Economics and Finance 389, Stockholm School of Economics, revised 08 Sep 2000.
    14. Karen Clay & Ramayya Krishnan & Eric Wolff, 2001. "Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry," NBER Chapters, in: E-commerce, pages 521-539, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dinlersoz, Emin M. & Pereira, Pedro, 2007. "On the diffusion of electronic commerce," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 541-574, June.
    2. Oz Shy, 2013. "Window shopping," Working Papers 13-4, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
    3. Eric Brousseau, 2002. "The Governance of Transactions by Commercial Intermediaries: An Analysis of the Re-engineering of Intermediation by Electronic Commerce," International Journal of the Economics of Business, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(3), pages 353-374.
    4. Michael R. Baye & John Morgan & Patrick Scholten, 2006. "Information, Search, and Price Dispersion," Working Papers 2006-11, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
    5. Maarten C.W. Janssen & Rob van der Noll, 2005. "Internet Retailing as a Marketing Strategy," Tinbergen Institute Discussion Papers 05-038/1, Tinbergen Institute.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Randy A. Nelson & Richard Cohen & Frederik Roy Rasmussen, 2007. "An Analysis of Pricing Strategy and Price Dispersion on the Internet," Eastern Economic Journal, Eastern Economic Association, vol. 33(1), pages 95-110, Winter.
    2. Austan Goolsbee & Judith Chevalier, 2002. "Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon and Barnes and Noble," NBER Working Papers 9085, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Pereira, Pedro, 2005. "Do lower search costs reduce prices and price dispersion?," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 17(1), pages 61-72, January.
    4. Michael A. Arnold & Christine Saliba, 2003. "Price Dispersion in Online Markets: The Case of College Textbooks," Working Papers 03-02, University of Delaware, Department of Economics.
    5. Gerard J. Berg, 2006. "Revolutionary Effects of New Information Technologies," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 116(509), pages 10-28, February.
    6. Judith Chevalier & Austan Goolsbee, 2003. "Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com," Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), Springer, vol. 1(2), pages 203-222, June.
    7. Moraga-González, José L. & Sándor, Zsolt & Wildenbeest, Matthijs R., 2014. "Prices, Product Differentiation, And Heterogeneous Search Costs," IESE Research Papers D/1097, IESE Business School.
    8. Böheim, René & Hackl, Franz & Hölzl-Leitner, Michael, 2021. "The impact of price adjustment costs on price dispersion in e-commerce," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    9. Delphine Irac & Claire Célérier & Philippe Askenazy, 2010. "Vente à distance, internet et dynamiques des prix," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 194(3), pages 1-13.
    10. Anirban Sengupta & Steven Wiggins, 2006. "Airline Pricing, Price Dispersion and Ticket Characteristics On and Off the Internet," Working Papers 06-07, NET Institute, revised Oct 2006.
    11. Jie Jennifer Zhang & Bing Jing, 2007. "The Impacts of Shopbots on Online Consumer Search," Working Papers 07-34, NET Institute, revised Sep 2007.
    12. Fiona Scott Morton, 2006. "Consumer Benefit from Use of the Internet," NBER Chapters, in: Innovation Policy and the Economy, Volume 6, pages 67-90, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    13. Kenneth Gillingham, Hao Deng, Ryan Wiser, Naim Darghouth, Gregory Nemet, Galen Barbose, Varun Rai, and Changgui Dong, 2016. "Deconstructing Solar Photovoltaic Pricing," The Energy Journal, International Association for Energy Economics, vol. 0(Number 3).
    14. Gao, Fujuan & Fenoaltea, Enrico Maria & Zhang, Yi-Cheng, 2023. "Market failure in a new model of platform design with partially informed consumers," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 619(C).
    15. Michael R. Baye & John Morgan, 2009. "Brand and Price Advertising in Online Markets," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(7), pages 1139-1151, July.
    16. Zhang, Xubing & Jiang, Bo, 2014. "Increasing Price Transparency: Implications of Consumer Price Posting for Consumers' Haggling Behavior and a Seller's Pricing Strategies," Journal of Interactive Marketing, Elsevier, vol. 28(1), pages 68-85.
    17. Richards, Timothy J. & Hamilton, Stephen F. & Allender, William, 2016. "Search and price dispersion in online grocery markets," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 255-281.
    18. Sophie Larribeau & Thierry Pénard, 2002. "Le commerce électronique en France : un essai de mesure sur le marché des CD," Économie et Statistique, Programme National Persée, vol. 355(1), pages 27-46.
    19. Bang, Se Hoon & Kim, Jaesoo, 2013. "Price discrimination via information provision," Information Economics and Policy, Elsevier, vol. 25(4), pages 215-224.
    20. Khan, Beethika S., 2004. "Consumer Adoption of Online Banking: Does Distance Matter?," Department of Economics, Working Paper Series qt2bt1d76s, Department of Economics, Institute for Business and Economic Research, UC Berkeley.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Retail Pricing; Consumer Behavior; E-Commerce; Price Discrimination;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
    • L81 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:iuiwop:0559. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Elisabeth Gustafsson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iuiiise.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.