Internet presumably reduces search cost driving price to the competitivelevel. Evidence from empirical research quantifying dispersion in theelectronic based markets has yield mixed results. More recent researchhas documented near zero dispersion in the electronic markets usingtransaction...

Recent IT research has analyzed how the performance of IT-enabled markets may differ from conventional markets. This literature has made two unexpected empirical findings. First, ITenabled markets for commodity goods exhibit significant price dispersion. Second, well-known retailers in these...

The growth of Internet price search tools, notably shopbots, has reduced consumers’ search costs for price and some product characteristics. While a variety of analytic models predict that increased consumer search through shopbots will lower price levels among competing retailers, there is no...

There have been many claims that the Internet represents a new nearly "frictionless market." Our research empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs. Using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected...

We study trading and prices in newly issued municipal bonds. Municipals, which trade in decentralized, broker-dealer markets, are underpriced when issued, but unlike equities the average price rises slowly over a period of several days. We document high levels of price dispersion in newly issued...

This paper explores the relationship between income distribution, prices, production efficiency and aggregate output in a decentralized search economy. We show that income distribution determines how competitive the market is, and thereby affects production efficiency and aggregate output. It is...

We modify the paper of Stahl (1989) [Stahl, D.O., 1989. Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search. American Economic Review 79, 700–12] by relaxing the assumption that consumers obtain the first price quotation for free. When all price quotations are costly to obtain, the unique...