Online price search across desktop and mobile devices: Evidence on cyberslacking and weather effects

This paper investigates online price search, taking advantage of proprietary data from a shopbot. We have daily observations on online price search on TrovaPrezzi.it, the most popular Italian shopbot, for one year, from March 2013 to February 2014. We start from some open research questions in the literature and focus on two exogenous factors: the day of the week on which the search takes place and the weather conditions. Price searches are larger on weekdays, especially on Mondays, and under bad weather conditions. The day of the week affects differently price searches across devices, with desktop being the preferred device on Mondays, providing evidence of cyberslacking. Weather conditions instead have a comparable impact across devices