An HLM-model of online price premia

Some Internet stores manage to charge prices that are significantly higher than market averages, therefore, obtaining some sort of price premium. This paper is dedicated to building a model that can be used to explain and predict a typical price premium that an Internet store charges for a specific product based on the information about the characteristics of the store and the features of the market for this product. Such models can provide support for pricing and assortment decisions: in particular, they allow detecting products that a store is likely to sell with the highest or the lowest markup based on price premia that are charged by stores with similar characteristics on similar markets.