Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Adaptive Assistants for Customized E-Shopping
IEEE Intelligent Systems
Intermediation and electronic markets: aggregation and pricing in internet commerce
Intermediation and electronic markets: aggregation and pricing in internet commerce
Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
Management Science
Management Science
Designing personalized user experiences in eCommerce
Shopbots: A Syntactic Present, A Semantic Future
IEEE Internet Computing
Design of a shopbot and recommender system for bundle purchases
Decision Support Systems
Consumer E-Tailer Choice Strategies at On-Line Shopping Comparison Sites
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
International Journal of Electronic Commerce
Shopbot 2.0: Integrating recommendations and promotions with comparison shopping
Decision Support Systems
Computer
Introducing spatial context in comparative pricing and product search
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Management of Emergent Digital EcoSystems
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
Search costs and consumer heterogeneity are two important explanations for the price dispersion in the brick and mortar (B&M) markets. Comparison shopping agents (CSAs) provide a single click decision support for consumers' purchasing related decision problems and reduce their search costs by providing detail price dispersion related information. Contemporary researchers in IS observe that even with such negligible search costs, price dispersion still continues in the online markets. Consumer heterogeneity and retailer heterogeneity have been agreed upon as two primary explanations for online price dispersions. In this paper, popular CSAs are analyzed to check if they provide complete and accurate price dispersion information. It is shown that because of the selection bias and temporal delay in updating information, contemporary CSAs may not present complete and accurate price dispersion information. In order to reach to an optimal purchasing decision, consumers may have to rely on a sequential search across multiple CSAs or browse through various retailers. This research adds a search cost dimension to explain the continuance of price dispersion in the online markets.