This paper focuses on the impact of hedonic and utilitarian values of shopping on retail agglomeration patronage issues, in particular on shopping behaviour and the perception of retail agglomerations. Our empirical study is based on a discussion of agglomerations’ potential to attract...

In many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either byindependent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve asdigitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directingconsumer traffic to downstream retailers in a distribution network. Thisreshapes the extended...

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...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] Dispersion in retail prices of identical goods is inconsistent with the standard model of price competition among identical firms, which predicts that all prices will be driven down to cost. One common...

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the way people buy and sell. The internet is characterized by increased access to information. This increased information should foster convergence to the “law of one price,” for homogenous goods. The surge of electronic markets has motivated a...

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...