Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com

Judith Chevalier and Austan Goolsbee ()

Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME), 2003, vol. 1, issue 2, 203-222

Abstract: Despite the interest in measuring price sensitivity of online consumers, most academic work on Internet commerce is hindered by a lack of data on quantity. In this paper we use publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online booksellers. Matching this information to prices, we can directly estimate the elasticities of demand facing both merchants as well as create a price index for online books. The results show significant price sensitivity at both merchants but demand at BarnesandNoble.com is much more price-elastic than is demand at Amazon.com. The data also allow us to estimate the magnitude of bias in the CPI due to the rise of Internet sales. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2003

Keywords: internet; retail; perfect competition; price indices; elasticity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2003
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (94)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1024634613982 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to 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:kap:qmktec:v:1:y:2003:i:2:p:203-222

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ng/journal/11129/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1024634613982

Access Statistics for this article

Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME) is currently edited by Pradeep Chintagunta

More articles in Quantitative Marketing and Economics (QME) from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().