Market structure and market performance in e-commerce

Franz Hackl (), Michael E. Kummer, Rudolf Winter-Ebmer and Christine Zulehner

No 11-084, ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research

Abstract: We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. This research is novel, because we exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated as exogenous in comparable studies on seller-behavior in e-commerce. We combine data from Austria's largest online site for price comparisons with retail-data on whole sale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input prices of firms, and all their moves in the entry and the pricing game. Using this information for 80 digital cameras, we generate instrumental variables based on the shops' entry decisions in the past. We find that instrumenting is particularly important for estimating the effect of competition on the markup of the price-leader.

Keywords: retailing; product life cycle; market structure; market performance; markup; price dispersion (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D43 L11 L13 L81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec, nep-com, nep-hme and nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/54959/1/684264145.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Market structure and market performance in E-commerce (2014)
Working Paper: Market Structure and Market Performance in E-Commerce (2014)
Working Paper: Market Structure and Market Performance in E-Commerce (2012)
Working Paper: Market Structure and Market Performance in E-Commerce (2012)
Working Paper: Market Structure and Market Performance in E-Commerce (2012)
Working Paper: Market structure and market performance in e-commerce (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:zewdip:11084

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ZEW Discussion Papers from ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().