Who Benefits from Information Disclosure? The Case of Retail Gasoline

Fernando Luco

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2019, vol. 11, issue 2, 277-305

Abstract: How does online price disclosure affect competition when both consumers and firms can use the disclosed information? This paper addresses this question exploiting the sequential implementation of an online price-disclosure policy in the Chilean retail gasoline industry. The results show that disclosure increased margins by 9 percent on average, though the effects varied across the country depending on the intensity of local search behavior. Because margins increased the least, and even decreased, in high-search areas, where income is also higher, the results also show that price disclosure policies may have important distributional effects.

JEL-codes: D83 L11 L71 L81 O13 Q35 Q41 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
Note: DOI: 10.1257/mic.20170110
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (29)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mic.20170110 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... u9aLhRX-7F9NiLjf7OmI (application/zip)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... -0Fjg0gFTG_w4jPAjvn8 (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles/attachments?retrie ... 5trRT5sfJ1oEJHDOQx6m (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
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:aea:aejmic:v:11:y:2019:i:2:p:277-305

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is currently edited by Johannes Hörner

More articles in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().