Lemony Prices: An Online Field Experiment on Price Dispersion
2011/04/19
研討會日期 : 2011-04-19
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor David Ong
地點 : Conference Room C103
演講者簡介 : David Ong got his Ph.D. in Economics from University of California, Davis in 2009. He is currently serving as Assistant Professor of HSBC School of Business at Peking University. His research field is in behavioral game theory, experimental economics, market microstructure, and industrial organization.
演講摘要 : We challenged the law of one price in an online field experiment. In the experiment, prepaid phone cards were sold on taobao.com, China’s largest online market with sales already equaling eBay in 2010. We show that consumers will not always buy the lowest priced product, all else being equal. Our field experiment design has two important advantages. It ruled out many confounds in prior empirical studies, in particular unobservable heterogeneity. It eliminated the external validity issue of prior laboratory experiments. The main result is that out of 657 sales, 103 were of the higher priced item. Higher priced items constituted 25% of the sales when the price gap was 0.05%. This decreased nearly linearly to 1% when the gap increased to 2.5%. This result is robust to different price levels. Our findings contribute to the “online price dispersion” paradox literature, and support the conjecture that people use prices as a signal of quality. Our result also extends Choi, Laibson and Madrian (2010)’s lab experiment to support Grossman’s and Stiglitz’s (1980) critique of the efficient market hypothesis. To our knowledge, no other studies of either financial or non financial products have separated price signals of quality from non-price signals. We show for the first time that price signals of quality by itself could drive price dispersion.
