Price dispersion on the internet: A review and directions for future research Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • The explosive growth in Internet retailing has sparked a stream of research on online price dispersion, defined as the distribution of prices (such as range and standard deviation) of an item with the same measured characteristics across sellers of the item at a given point in time. In this paper, we review the empirical and analytical literature on online price dispersion and outline the future directions in this research stream. We address the issue of whether price dispersion is greater or smaller online than off-line, examine whether price dispersion on the Internet has changed over time, discuss multichannel retailing and measurement of price dispersion, explore why Internet price dispersion exists, and investigate the drivers of online price dispersion.

published proceedings

  • Journal of Interactive Marketing

author list (cited authors)

  • Pan, X., Ratchford, B. T., & Shankar, V.

citation count

  • 130

complete list of authors

  • Pan, Xing||Ratchford, Brian T||Shankar, Venkatesh

publication date

  • November 2004