99 cent: Price points in e-commerce

Basu (2006) argues that the prevalence of 99 cent prices in shops can be explained with rational consumers who disregard the rightmost digits of the price. This bounded rational behaviour leads to a Bertrand equilibrium with positive markups. We use data from an Austrian price comparison site and find results highly compatible with Basu's theory. We can show that price points - in particular prices ending in 9 - are prevalent and have significant impact on consumer demand. Moreover, these price points are sticky; neither the price-setter itself wants to change them neither the rivals do underbid these prices, if they represent the cheapest price on the market. --Competitive Behaviour,Pricing Behaviour,E-Commerce,Pricing in the Nines,Focal Pricing

99 cent: Price Points in E-Commerce

Basu (2006) argues that the prevalence of 99 cent prices in shops can be explained with rational consumers who disregard the rightmost digits of the price. This bounded rational behaviour leads to a Bertrand equi- librium with positive markups. We use data from an Austrian price com- parison site and find results highly compatible with Basu's theory. We can show that price points - in particular prices ending in 9 - are preva- lent and have significant impact on consumer demand. Moreover, these price points are sticky; neither the price-setter itself wants to change them neither the rivals do underbid these prices, if they represent the cheapest price on the market.e-commerce, price comparison, price policy

The Effectiveness of Health Screening

Using a matched insurant-general practitioner panel data set, we estimated the effect of a general health-screening program on individuals’ health status and health care cost. To account for selection into treatment, we used regional variations in the intensity of exposure to supply-determined screening recommendations as an instrumental variable. We found that screening participation substantially increased inpatient and outpatient health care costs for up to two years after treatment. In the medium term, we found cost savings in the outpatient sector, whereas in the long run, no statistically significant effects of screening on either health care cost component could be discerned. In summary, screening participation increases health care costs. Since we did not find any statistically significant effect of screening participation on insurants’ health status at any point in time, we do not recommend a general health-screening program. However, given that we found some evidence for cost-saving potentials for the sub-sample of younger insurants, we suggest more targeted screening programs.Health screening, health care costs, sick leave, mortality

The Effectiveness of Health Screening

Using a matched insurant-general practitioner panel data set, we estimated the effect of a general health-screening program on individuals’ health status and health care cost. To account for selection into treatment, we used regional variations in the intensity of exposure to supply-determined screening recommendations as an instrumental variable. We found that screening participation substantially increased inpatient and outpatient health care costs for up to two years after treatment. In the medium term, we found cost savings in the outpatient sector, whereas in the long run, no statistically significant effects of screening on either health care cost component could be discerned. In summary, screening participation increases health care costs. Since we did not find any statistically significant effect of screening participation on insurants’ health status at any point in time, we do not recommend a general health-screening program. However, given that we found some evidence for cost-saving potentials for the sub-sample of younger insurants, we suggest more targeted screening programs.Health screening, health care costs, sick leave, mortality

Patent Claim Structure Recognition

In patents, the claims section is the most relevant part. It is written in a legal jargon, containing independent and dependent claims, forming a hierarchy. We present our work aimed at automatically identifying that hierarchy within complete patent claim texts. Beginning with a short introduction into patent claims and typical use cases for searching in claims, we proceed to show results from a preliminary context analysis with English claims from the European Patents Fulltext (EPFULL) database. We point out some possibilities with which claim dependency is indicated in the text and show a way of identifying them. Additionally, we describe several of the problems encountered, in particular problems resulting from noisy data. Finally, we show results from our internal evaluations, in which accuracies greater than 93% were measured. We also indicate areas of further research

The impact of price adjustment costs on price dispersion in E-commerce

We analyze price dispersion using panel data from a large price comparison site. We use past pricing behavior to instrument for potential endogeneity that might result from the selection of firms to certain product markets. We find that greater price adjustment costs result in greater price dispersion. Although the impact of price adjustment costs on price dispersion became weaker over time, the causal effect of price adjustment costs on price dispersion is still present at the end of the period. Our results are robust to many alternative empirical speciffications. We also test a range of alternative explanations of price dispersion, such as search cost, service differentiation, obfuscation, vertical restraints, and market structure.Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Serie

Market structure and market performance in E-commerce

We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. We exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated as exogenous in comparable studies on seller-behavior in e-commerce. We combine data from Austria´s largest online site for price comparisons with retail data on wholesale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input prices of firms, and all their moves in the entry and the pricing game. Using this information for 70 digital cameras, we generate instrumenting is particularly important for estimating the effect of competition on the markup of the price leader

Entry, exit, and pricing strategies at online price-comparison sites : do price markups fall by themselves, or is competition crucial?

Immer mehr Menschen gehen beim Surfen im World Wide Web auf Einkaufstour. Dabei geben Preisvergleichsseiten oftmals hilfreiche Tipps, wo das gesuchte Produkt am günstigsten zu haben ist. Dass sich ein Vergleich lohnt, zeigt eine Studie des Zentrums für Europäische Wirtschaftsforschung (ZEW) Mannheim und der Universität Linz. Die Studie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass bereits zehn zusätzliche Anbieter des gleichen Produkts den Preisaufschlag des günstigsten Anbieters um 1,7 Prozentpunkte verringern

Discriminating the viscoelastic properties of cellulose textile fibers for recycling

The viscoelastic properties of cellulose fibers play an important role in chemical recycling of textiles. Here we discriminated the intrinsic viscosity of cotton roll towels and bed linens using near-infrared imaging spectroscopy and supervised pattern recognition. The classification results showed training and test set accuracies of 84–97% and indicated that the relevant spectral features were related to water, cellulose, and cellulose crystallinity. We hypothesized that the decreasing intrinsic viscosity of cotton was associated with changes in cellulose crystallinity and water adsorption, which was supported by additional X-ray and sorption measurements. These results are important as they indicate the potential to non-invasively estimate the degree of polymerization and the suitability of different cotton materials for chemical recycling. We propose that changes in the degree of polymerization and cellulose crystallinity could be used as an indicator of the chemical quality of cellulose fibers, which would have wider impacts for textile recycling.</p

Market structure and market performance in e-commerce

We investigate the effect of market structure on market performance in the market for consumer electronics. This research is novel, because we exploit product life cycle information to build an instrumental variable for the number of firms in a market, a variable which hitherto had to be treated as exogenous in comparable studies on seller-behavior in e-commerce. We combine data from Austria's largest online site for price comparisons with retail-data on whole sale prices provided by a major hardware producer for consumer electronics. We observe input prices of firms, and all their moves in the entry and the pricing game. Using this information for 80 digital cameras, we generate instrumental variables based on the shops' entry decisions in the past. We find that instrumenting is particularly important for estimating the effect of competition on the markup of the price-leader. --retailing,product life cycle,market structure,market performance,markup,price dispersion