デジタル経済における競争および価格メカニズムの変容
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概要
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The Internet has the potential to significantly reduce search costs by allowing consumers to engage in low-cost price comparisons online. And also, it is often argued that as electronic markets lower the cost of market transactions, traditional roles for intermediaries will be eliminated, leading to disintermediation. Information systems can serve as intermediaries between the buyers and the sellers in a market, creating an electronic marketplace that lowers the cost of buyers in acquiring information about seller prices and product offerings. This paper reviews the preceding researches about empirical evidences on the impact that the rise of Internet cmomparison shopping sites has had for the prices level and dispersion. Economic theory suggests that this reduction in search costs plays a major role in determining the implications of these systems for market efficiency and competitive behavior. As a result, electronic mrketplaces reduce the inefficiencies caused by buyer serch costs, in the process reducing the ability of sellers to extract monopolistic profits while increasing the ability of markets to optimally allocate productive resources. The resulting implications for the incentives of buyers, sellers and independent intermediaries to invest in electronic marketplaces are explored. Additional findings are as follows ; (1) Internet retailers' price adjustments over time are much smaller than conventional retailers' price adjustmentspresumably reflecting lower menu costs in Internet-based marketplaces. (2) Levels of price dispersion depend importantly in the measures employed. (3) While there is lower friction in many dimensions of Internet competition, branding, awareness, and trust remain important sources of heterogeneity among Internet relailers.
- 2001-03-31