Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet

Glenn Ellison, Sara Fisher Ellison

NBER Working Paper No. 10570
Issued in June 2004
NBER Program(s):Industrial Organization

We examine the competition between a group of Internet retailers that operate in an environment where a price search engine plays a dominant role. We show that for some products in this environment, the easy price search makes demand tremendously price-sensitive. Retailers, though, engage in obfuscation---practices that frustrate consumer search or make it less damaging to firms---resulting in much less price sensitivity on other products. We discuss several models of obfuscation and examine its effects on demand and markups empirically. Observed markups are adequate to allow efficient online retailers to survive.

Machine-readable bibliographic record - MARC, RIS, BibTeX

Document Object Identifier (DOI): 10.3386/w10570

Published: Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2009. "Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 77(2), pages 427-452, 03. citation courtesy of

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