Une analyse empirique de la dispersion des prix sur Internet

An Empirical Analysis of Price Dispersion on the Internet Online price dispersion has remained a puzzle for many years. In this article, we test the effects of a range of factors identified in the literature including vendor strategy, market structure, vendor heterogeneity and the time dimension. We use a dataset collected from the Amazon.fr marketplace for books, CDs and DVDs from March to November, 2006. We find that i) online retailers do not adjust prices frequently; ii) price dispersion increases with the number of sellers and over time ; iii) the seller characteristics explain a small part of price dispersion ; i.v) there remains unexplained price dispersion.