The Empirical Study Of Price And Price Dispersion On B2C E-Commerce Market

It is generally believed that e-commerce market can reduce searching cost effectively, increase information transmitting efficiency and transparency, consequently enhance market efficiency. Even more, some scholars even put forward the theoretical hypothesis that e-commerce market will lead to friction-free commerce. According to this hypothesis, deduction that can be tested obtained from this hypothesis is that e-commerce will lead to lower market prices and the price dispersion between different vendors will disappear. Concentrated on immature Chinese e-commerce market, it will be a research issue which has important theoretical value and practical significance that we collect the market price data in order to execute an examination on the above deduction , investigate whether this hypothesis suppose is tenable or not.Considered the electronics consumable DC and DV as an example, this paper collected two types of on-line price data: one type is pure internet retailers (Dotcoms) , the other is multi-channel retailer (MCRs) that have on-line and traditional business. By using parameters and nonparametric statistical tests, econometric modeling and ANOVA analysis method, we conducted an empirical analysis on prices and the price dispersion of China's B2C e-commerce market. The results showed that China's B2C e-commerce market efficiency has no efficiency increasing. Details are showed as follows:1. Dotcoms' prices and the price dispersion level are significantly higher than the level of MCRs'.2. During the whole studying period, two kinds of retailers' price level has the trend of declining along with time. The price dispersion is widespread and continual existing. And the MCRs' decline range is broader than Dotcoms'.3. The internet retailers' pricing strategy suffers the influence of the popular extent of the product. Compared with the random-choosing products, popular products' declines slower and the price dispersion is smaller.4. The internet retailers' own characteristics affect the pricing of products. Different retailers had different mean price.5. Two kinds of retailers all have obviously "festival-effect". And this effect is more notable for popular products than the random-choosing products.