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。它的溢出效应影响着我们生活的各个领域，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。到2020年，电子商务在食品零售中的份额预计将增加到零售总收入的30%。使用数字渠道接触客户成为传统零售商的竞争力问题，他们已经开始通过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参与者的激烈竞争，这些参与者已经在非食品部门赢得了消费者的信任和忠诚。这种竞争，再加上消费者搜索成本的降低和在线卖家价格调整成本的减少，导致传统零售业的转型，并在在线和离线零售商之间建立了一种新的动态关系，特别是在定价策略方面，这是该项目的重点。尽管电子商务在农业食品部门的作用越来越大，但人们对在线定价知之甚少。该项目旨在填补我们对在线市场的了解中的这一空白，并阐明德国杂货电子零售价格制定的主要问题，包括：（i）价格水平和价格分散，（ii）价格刚性和影响价格调整的概率，大小和频率的因素，（iii）汇率传递到在线价格，以及（iv）空间价格制定。

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.