Journal Article10.1023/A:1024634613982
Measuring Prices and Price Competition Online: Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used publicly available data on the sales ranks of about 20,000 books to derive quantity proxies at the two leading online booksellers, and matched this information to prices, directly estimating the elasticities of demand facing both merchants as well as creating a price index for online books.
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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.
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Citations
The Effect of Word of Mouth on Sales: Online Book Reviews
Judith A. Chevalier,Dina Mayzlin +1 more
TL;DR: The authors examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com, and find that reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon and that an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in relative sales.
Estimating the Helpfulness and Economic Impact of Product Reviews: Mining Text and Reviewer Characteristics
TL;DR: In this paper, the impact of reviews on economic outcomes like product sales and how different factors affect social outcomes such as their perceived usefulness was examined, and it was shown that the extent of subjectivity, informativeness, readability, and linguistic correctness in reviews matters in influencing sales and perceived usefulness.
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Estimating the Helpfulness and Economic Impact of Product Reviews: Mining Text and Reviewer Characteristics
TL;DR: This paper is the first study that integrates econometric, text mining, and predictive modeling techniques toward a more complete analysis of the information captured by user-generated online reviews in order to estimate their helpfulness and economic impact.
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Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy: Estimating the Value of Increased Product Variety at Online Booksellers
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a framework and empirical estimates that quantify the economic impact of increased product variety made available through electronic markets, and they show that this variety can be a significantly larger source of consumer surplus gains.
The Effect of File Sharing on Record Sales: An Empirical Analysis
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed whether file sharing has reduced the legal sales of music and found that downloads have an effect on sales that is statistically indistinguishable from zero, which is inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the decline in music sales during their study period.
References
Do electronic marketplaces lower the price of goods
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Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort; An Introduction to Human Ecology
TL;DR: Reading is a need and a hobby at once, and the principle of least effort an introduction to human ecology as the choice of reading is found here.
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Capital Market Imperfections and Countercyclical Markups: Theory and Evidence
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a model of countercyclical markups based on capital market imperfections and provide evidence from the supermarket industry in support of this theory, showing that during regional and macroeconomic recessions, more financially constrained supermarket chains raise their prices relative to less financially constrained chains.
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Prices and Price Dispersion on the Web: Evidence from the Online Book Industry
TL;DR: The authors examined pricing by thirty-two online United States-based bookstores and found that more competition led to lower prices and to lower price dispersion, while holding competitive structure constant, more widely advertised items also had lower prices.