This paper examines 4 million daily price observations for over 1000 consumer electronics products on the price comparison site Shopper.com. We find little support for the notion that prices on the Internet are converging to the “law of one price.” In addition, observed levels of price...

Using data from one of the Internet’s leading price comparison sites for consumer electronics products, we present evidence for the persistence of price dispersion for 36 homogeneous products. The markets for these products are “thick” with an average of over 20 firms selling each product....

Economic theory indicates that E-retailers competing at price comparison sites, such as Shopper.com, must charge prices that cannot be systematically predicted by their rivals. Consistent with theory, we find significant variation in the identity of the lowprice firm as well as the level of the...

Price dispersion is ubiquitous in settings that closely approximate textbook Bertrand competition. We show (Propositions 2 and 3) that only a little bounded rationality among sellers is needed to rationalize such dispersion. A variety of statistical tests, based on data sets from two independent...

In a (first price) all-pay auction, bidders simultaneously submit bids for an item. All players forfeit their bids, and the high bidder receives the item. This auction is widely used in economics to model rent seeking, R&D races, political contests, and job promotion tournaments. We fully...

We analyze daily mortgage rates posted by online lenders at the price comparison site, Microsurf. While cost shocks occurred almost daily in our sample, quoted mortgage rates are surprisingly rigid: Only 16 percent of the posted rates represent changes. However, firms that adjusted rates in...