Journal ArticleDOI
Can Price Dispersion in Online Markets be Explained byDifferences in e-Tailer Service Quality?
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In this paper, the authors conducted an empirical analysis of 105 e-tailers comprising 6739 price observations for 581 items in eight product categories and found that online price dispersion is persistent even after controlling for etailer heterogeneity.Abstract:
It has been hypothesized that the online medium and the Internet lower search costs and that electronic markets are more competitive than conventional markets. This suggests that price dispersion - the distribution of prices of an item indicated by measures 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 for identical products sold by e-tailers online (on the Internet) should be smaller than it is offline, but some recent empirical evidence reveals the opposite. A study by Smith et al. (2000) speculates that this is due to heterogeneity among e-tailers in such factors as shopping convenience and consumer awareness. Based on an empirical analysis of 105 e-tailers comprising 6739 price observations for 581 items in eight product categories, we show that online price dispersion is persistent, even after controlling for e-tailer heterogeneity. Our general conclusion is that the proportion of the price dispersion explained by e-tailer characteristics is small. This evidence is contrary to the hypothesis that search costs in online markets are low, or that online markets are highly competitive. The results also show that after controlling for differences in e-tailer service quality, prices at pure play e-tailers are equal to or lower than those at bricks-and-clicks e-tailers for all categories except books and computer software.read more
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Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Satisfaction, and Market Value
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed and tested a conceptual framework, which predicts that customer satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between CSR and firm market value (i.e., Tobin's q and stock return), and corporate abilities (innovativeness capability and product quality) moderate the financial returns to CSR, and these moderated relationships are mediated by customer satisfaction.
Journal ArticleDOI
Are the Drivers and Role of Online Trust the Same for All Web Sites and Consumers? A Large-Scale Exploratory Empirical Study
TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed a conceptual model that links Web site and consumer characteristics, online trust, and behavioral intent, and estimated this model on data from 6831 consumers across 25 sites from eight Web site categories, using structural equation analysis with a priori and post hoc segmentation.
Journal ArticleDOI
Comfort your online customer: quality, trust and loyalty on the internet
TL;DR: In this paper, the roles of service quality, satisfaction and trust in an e-commerce context were investigated and it was found that e-trust is found to directly affect loyalty.
Journal ArticleDOI
Online trust: a stakeholder perspective, concepts, implications, and future directions
TL;DR: A stakeholder theory of trust is proposed, a broad conceptual framework of online trust including its underlying elements, antecedents, and consequences are articulate, and some promising future research avenues in online trust are proposed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Marketing Models of Service and Relationships
Roland T. Rust,Tuck Siong Chung +1 more
Abstract: Given the growth of the service sector, and advances in information technology and communications that facilitate the management of relationships with customers, models of service and relationships are a fast-growing area of marketing science. This article summarizes existing work in this area and identifies promising topics for future research. Models of service and relationships can help managers manage service more efficiently, customize service more effectively, manage customer satisfaction and relationships, and model the financial impact of those customer relationships. Models for managing service have often emphasized analytical approaches to pricing, but emerging issues such as the trade-off between privacy and customization are attracting increasing attention. The trade-offs between productivity and customization have also been addressed by both analytical and empirical models, but future research in the area of service customization will likely place increased emphasis on e-service and truly personalized interactions. Relationship models will focus less on models of customer expectations and length of relationship, and more on modeling the effects of dynamic marketing interventions with individual customers. The nature of service relationships increasingly leads to financial impact being assessed within customer and across product, rather than the traditional reverse, suggesting the increasing importance of analyzing customer lifetime value (CLV) and managing the firm's customer equity.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Hedonic Prices and Implicit Markets: Product Differentiation in Pure Competition
TL;DR: In this article, a theory of hedonic prices is formulated as a problem in the economics of spatial equilibrium in which the entire set of implicit prices guides both consumer and producer locational decisions in characteristics space.
Book ChapterDOI
The Economics of Information
TL;DR: In this paper, the identification of sellers and the discovery of their prices is described as an example of the role of the search for information in economic life, and the identification and discovery of prices of goods and services is discussed.
Journal ArticleDOI
Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
TL;DR: In this paper, the role of buyer search costs in markets with differentiated product offerings is analyzed in the context of an electronic marketplace, and the allocational efficiencies such a reduction can bring to a differentiated market are formalized.
Journal ArticleDOI
Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
TL;DR: The authors empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs-using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected over a period of 15 months, comparing pricing behavior at 41 Internet and conventional retail outlets.
Posted Content
Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
TL;DR: The authors empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products (books and CDs) using a data set of over 4,500 price observations collected over a period of 9 months.