Pricing used books on Amazon.com: a spatial approach to price dispersion

Haoying Wang

Spatial Economic Analysis, 2018, vol. 13, issue 1, 99-117

Abstract: This paper estimates a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model of price dispersion using publicly available internet bookselling data. It uses a semiparametric adaptive estimator that does not require the usual Gaussian assumption of maximum likelihood (ML) estimators. The results suggest that both price competition and seller heterogeneity are key drivers of the observed price dispersion. The paper finds that sellers with large sales volume, newly established sellers and US mainland states-based sellers tend to price lower. The identified significant spatial interaction is evidence of spatial price competition. Controlling for everything else, a seller asks a lower price when large sellers charge relatively high prices, which is also evidence of price-based selling and undercutting.

Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/17421772.2017.1369147 (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:taf:specan:v:13:y:2018:i:1:p:99-117

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RSEA20

DOI: 10.1080/17421772.2017.1369147

Access Statistics for this article

Spatial Economic Analysis is currently edited by Bernie Fingleton and Danilo Igliori

More articles in Spatial Economic Analysis from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().