IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/trf/wpaper/345.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Impact of the Internet on Retail Competition: Evidence from Technological Differences in Internet Access

Author

Listed:
  • Gebhardt, Georg

Abstract

Does the internet increase competition? To address this question, I exploit two institutional details unique to Germany: (1) Some municipalities received glass fibre cables that cannot be upgraded to DSL; I use these municipalities as a treatment group with reduced online competition. (2) German law mandates resale price maintenance for books; I compare three retailing sectors, electronics (price competition), books (no price competition), and food (no online sales), to identify the effect of price competition: The effect of price competition is highly significant. Full broadband access reduces offline electronics retailers’ producer rents by 1.5 percent per year from 1999 to 2007.

Suggested Citation

  • Gebhardt, Georg, 2010. "The Impact of the Internet on Retail Competition: Evidence from Technological Differences in Internet Access," Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 345, Free University of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Bonn, University of Mannheim, University of Munich.
  • Handle: RePEc:trf:wpaper:345
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/13209/1/345.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Bauernschuster, Stefan & Falck, Oliver & Woessmann, Ludger, 2014. "Surfing alone? The internet and social capital: Evidence from an unforeseeable technological mistake," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 117(C), pages 73-89.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Internet; Market Structure; Retail Competition; Differences in Differences;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure, Pricing, and Design - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
    • L81 - Industrial Organization - - Industry Studies: Services - - - Retail and Wholesale Trade; e-Commerce
    • L13 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Oligopoly and Other Imperfect Markets

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:trf:wpaper:345. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Tamilla Benkelberg (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.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.