What we do (and don’t) know about online pricing: Evidence from e-commerce in the grocery sector

数字化是快速发展的全球化世界的必然特征。它的溢出效应影响到我们生活的方方面面，包括我们的日常购物体验。数字化已经给德国的传统零售业带来了巨大的变化。大约20%的电子、媒体和休闲产品是在网上购买的。预计到2020年，电子商务在食品零售业的份额将占零售总收入的30%。对于传统零售商来说，使用数字渠道接触客户已经成为一个竞争力问题，他们已经开始通过成为多渠道来拥抱数字化。然而，在互联网上，这些零售商面临着来自大型国际企业的强大竞争，这些企业已经在非食品领域赢得了消费者的信任和忠诚度。这种竞争，再加上消费者更低的搜索成本和在线卖家不断减少的价格调整成本，导致了传统零售业的转型，并在线上和线下零售商之间创造了一种新的动态关系，特别是在定价策略方面，这是项目的重点。尽管电子商务在农业食品领域的作用越来越大，但人们对在线定价知之甚少。本项目旨在填补我们对在线市场知识的这一空白，并阐明德国食品杂货电子零售定价的主要问题，包括：(I)价格水平和价格分散，(Ii)价格刚性和影响价格调整概率、大小和频率的因素，(Iii)汇率传递到在线价格，以及(Iv)空间价格设定。

Digitalization is an inevitable feature of a rapidly evolving globalized world. Its spillovers influence all areas of our lives, including our everyday shopping experience. Digitalization has already introduced huge changes to the traditional retailing sector in Germany. About 20% of all electronic, media and leisure products are bought online. The share of e-commerce in food retailing is forecast to increase up to 30% of total retailing revenue already by 2020. Using digital channels to reach their customers became a matter of competitiveness for conventional retailers, who have already started embracing digitalization by becoming multichannel. On the Internet, however, these retailers face strong rivalry from large international players, who already gained consumers’ trust and loyalty in the non-food sector. This competition, coupled with lower search costs for consumers and diminishing price-adjustment costs for sellers online, leads to a transformation of traditional retailing and creates a new dynamic relation between online and offline retailers, especially in terms of their pricing strategies, which are in the focus of the project. Despite an increasing role of e-commerce in agri-food sector, very little is known about online pricing. This project intends to fill this gap in our knowledge about online markets and shed light on major issues of price setting in German grocery e-retailing including: (i) price level and price dispersion, (ii) price rigidity and factors that influence the probability, the size and the frequency of price adjustments, (iii) exchange rate pass-through to online prices, and (iv) spatial price setting.