电子市场经济学留学生作业代写
电子市场经济学留学生作业代写
Economics Of The Electronic Marketplace
市场是经济的核心，我们讨论的元素在经典的微观经济理论市场相匹配的买家和卖家，促进交流和提供的基础设施，并使这种交流发生。
在这个元素中，我们将观察互联网上的电子市场的出现。我们将分析市场的功能，存在的市场类型，以及在互联网市场上提供的产品。
然后，，我们将使用我们的交易成本经济学的知识来辨别，组织将选择使用市场的经济活动，以及如何选择已经受到互联网的影响。
然后将分析电子市场发展的趋势。我们也将分析拍卖在电子商务中的作用，最后，考虑电子市场的效率。
Markets are central to the functioning of economies, as we discussed in the elements on classical microeconomic theory Markets match buyers and sellers, facilitate exchange and provide the infrastructure which allows this exchange to take place.
In this element we will look at the emergence of electronic markets on the Internet. We will analyse the functions of markets, the types of market which exist and the products which are available in Internet markets.
We will then use our knowledge of Transaction cost economics to discern when organisations will choose to use markets for economic activity and how this choice has been affected by the Internet.
Trends of electronic market development will then be analysed. We will also look at the role of auctions in e-commerce and finally, the efficiency of electronic markets will be considered.
Defining markets 定义市场
As this element is about markets, we first need to define the term market. To quote Mansfield (1980, pp19-20), a market is:-
"A group of firms or individuals in touch with each other in order to buy or sell some goods. This does not mean that every participant in the market must be in touch with every other participant. An individual or organisation is part of a market if they are in contact with just a subset of the other participants."
Whilst a market may be in a particular physical location, e.g. a street market, a cattle market or a particular financial market, the vast majority of markets are not located in such close physical proximity. With the development of transport links and modern communications this is increasingly the case, as buyers and sellers become remote. Rayport and Sviokla (1996) classify this distinction as between the physical marketplace and the electronic marketspace.
Functions of a market 市场功能
Bakos outlines the key functions of a market (Bakos, 1998). These are:
Matching buyers and sellers
Facilitation of transactions
Provision of institutional infrastructure
Matching buyers and sellers 买家和卖家匹配
Markets bring together buyers and sellers and find a level of equilibrium where supply equals demand. This function has the following three parts to it:
Product offerings 产品
Markets provide sellers with information about demand, which allows them to develop products. They can then consider the implications, in terms of the resources required to meet this demand, and the likely benefits. It may even be that this information tells them they cannot profitably serve this demand.
Search 搜索
Markets enable buyers to search for products which fit their requirements in terms of price and other factors, for example, quality. How efficiently this can be done depends on the availability and quality of information. In the same way, markets enable sellers to search for buyers who are likely to buy their products, for example, through market research and advertising.
Price formation 价格形成
A central role of markets is price formation, or market clearing. This is the level at which supply equals demand. Prices in markets may be fixed or negotiable.
In the above market situation, when the price is set above P1, supply exceeds demand. However, when the price is reduced to P1, the market clears at Q1.
It may be that markets do not 'clear', if prices are not flexible or 'sticky'. For example, organisations may prefer to hold excess stock, at least in the short term, rather than reduce prices. An indicator of market efficiency is whether markets clear. The lowering of menu costs, which are the costs of changing prices, caused by the Internet and the more flexible forms of pricing which are emerging, such as reverse pricing, could indicate greater efficiency.
Facilitation of transactions 交易手续
This role involves transferring the product to the buyer, which for physical products involves logistics and for digital products Internet transfer, and payment to the seller. The logistics function may be carried out by the market maker, or organiser, or by a further intermediary. The payment function may also be through the market maker, a further intermediary or directly between the participants.
Markets also require the development of trust to prevent opportunistic behaviour as, for example, there may be a delay between the transfer of payment and the receipt of products, or there is the risk the products may not be what they claim to be. This function is required to protect all parties - buyers, sellers and intermediaries.
Ebay, for example, has its 'Safe Harbour' team which is designed to prevent fraud and abuse of their market, and ratings of buyers and sellers which, by identifying unscrupulous traders, works to build trust. They also offer escrow services, whereby payment is held by a trusted third party, in this case the market maker, until the products have been inspected.
Further examples of escrow are QXL's SafePay service for their auction service and Itrustyou.com, an independent party.
Fastparts, which operates (anonymous) auction markets for overproduced electronic components, addresses the quality aspect of the trust issue by inspecting products for quality and offering guaranteed payment.
Facilitation also involves the actual mechanism for trading to take place. In the Internet context this is the actual provision of the electronic marketspace, website, which allows trading to take place. This is provided by the market maker.
Institutional infrastructure 制度基础
This refers to the laws, rules and regulations which apply to market activities which are required to resolve disputes regarding contracts, illegal behaviour and so on. The legal context is a matter of some debate as complexity comes from the international nature of the Internet. The case involving Yahoo and Nazi memorabilia in Summer 2000 was an example of this (BBC 2000).
The rules and regulations are the responsibility of the owner of the market, the market maker. A fundamental regulation is that someone must be registered before they can take place in trading. Norms of behaviour are also required to provide certainty to participants, for example, eBay and Loot have etiquette and punishments for those who break these norms of behaviour in their markets.
Types of electronic market 电子市场类型
Electronic markets can develop from conventional markets or they can replace hierarchical relationships. Berryman et al (1998) distinguish electronic markets as either:
Seller controlled
Buyer controlled
Or neutral
Seller controlled 卖方控制
These markets are usually set up by a single vendor with the aim of maximising sales. Dell and Cisco, which allow buyers to configure and then place orders online provide examples. Dell and others are also offering auctions through their websites.
Groups of sellers can also emerge to create marketplaces. One such example is the global health care system which was set up by leading sellers including Baxter , Johnson and Johnson and Abbott Laboratories . The motivation to do this, apart from competitive pressure, is to create a bigger marketplace, which offsets the increased choice to the consumer. Berryman et al (1998) argue that when deciding on their web market strategy organisations need to consider their strengths in terms of product differentiation and brand awareness. Cisco, for example, is strong enough in both of these categories to sell from its own website whilst organisations that are not as strong need to consider selling through a wider range of marketplaces.
Buyer controlled 买房控制
The aim of buyer controlled markets is to maximise choice through increased competition and drive down prices. This may take the form of a single buyer developing its own marketplace. Berryman et al (1998) gives the example of Japan Airlines posting procurement notices on the web to find suppliers of in-flight products.
Groups of buyers can also develop a marketplace. For example, we are seeing the development of markets in the auto, retail and food industries.
Buyer's intermediaries have also emerged with GroupTrade, for example, in the UK aggregating demand from buyers to achieve economies in purchasing. Reverse auctions, which we will examine later in this element, are also a form of buyer controlled market.
FreeMarkets, who operate auctions for industrial parts, raw materials, commodities and services, illustrate the role of intermediaries as agents in markets. They offer an advisory service to help buyers refine their requirements and also, as noted earlier, screen potential suppliers. We can see this as increasing buyer sophistication and lessening the possibility for opportunistic behaviour; factors which restrain the growth of markets.
When deciding on a strategy as a buyer Berryman et al (1998) outline buyer size and the number of potential suppliers as the key points to be considered. If an organisation has sufficient scale through its own purchases, and there are many suppliers, it can set up its own market. However, as we will discuss, there are forces which work against monopsonist (single buyer) markets as they are anti-competitive. Smaller organisations, in contrast, will tend to need to use an aggregator or form a consortium to achieve the required scale.
Neutral
These are set up by a third party to link buyers and sellers. These may be:
Evaluators e.g. ShopSmart
Business malls e.g. Barclaysquare
Product specific search engines e.g. CNET
The first three types of neutral marketplace are covered in the element Disintermediation and intermediation whilst auctions are covered in a later part of this element.
Scale: A neutral marketplace, which sells a wide range of products, will generate economies of scale, which a more specialised operation will find difficult to match. The same advantages of scale of operation can also apply to other market functions such as facilitation.
Access to information: Berryman et al (1998) argue that participants can more easily gain access to market information in a neutral market. In a buyer or seller controlled marketplace this would be at the discretion of the controlling party, who may prevent access.
Anonymity: In markets where anonymity is important neutral intermediaries will be heavily used. An example of this is Fastparts where manufacturers can sell excess stock anonymously without affecting their normal prices. This, however, assumes anonymity is possible, which will only be the case for standardised products.
Products available on the Internet 互联网上的产品
We outlined these in classical microeconomic theory: demand, supply and products . To summarise, we distinguished between conventional products, which were goods and services, or more commonly a combination of the two, and digital products, which could be digitised and thus delivered over the Internet. We drew the further distinction between digital goods and digital services. Finally, we noted the growing digital element in conventional goods, for example traffic navigation systems which operate through the Internet.
Perishable products 易逝品
Sellers have long used discounting to clear perishable products. The ability of the Internet to connect buyers and sellers has extended this market.
Advertising: Sellers of on-line advertising have until now had a larger amount of unsold stock than in conventional formats (Stone, Woodcock and Machtynger 2000, p203). Moreover, selling off space in a separate market avoids dealing with buyers who purchased space at full price, which could damage normal rates. There are now a range of websites which are offering markets for online advertising, e.g., onemediaplace.com.
Leisure: Lastminute.com see themselves as pioneering a new wave of last minute mobile commerce in our leisure time. Whilst unsold stock can already be offered through this medium, advances in telecommunications technology, e.g., Internet enabled mobile phones and global positioning systems, and increased personalisation will enable these offerings to be targeted by location. So empty restaurants and cinemas will be able to offer their products at discounted prices, depending on market demand, to buyers who are in the vicinity.
Logistics: There are also interesting possibilities in the road haulage industry as lorries are either usually picking up, or dropping off, a consignment of products. It is estimated, unsurprisingly, that 50% of trucks on US roads are carrying empty loads (Symonds, 1999, p17). However, there is no systematic way of connecting the potential buyers and sellers of this space. National Transportation Exchange is a company that has sprung up to connect owners of empty space with potential buyers.
Hierarchies and markets 层次和市场
We will now build on our understanding of Transaction cost economics to analyse the use of markets by organisations.
"Economies have two basic mechanisms for coordinating the flow of materials through adjacent steps in the value added chain: markets and hierarchies" (Malone, Yates and Benjamin, 1987, p2).
Markets coordinate this flow through the forces of supply and demand. A selection is made from a group of sellers who are evaluated in terms of price and other relevant factors.
Hierarchies, in contrast, coordinate through managerial decision making. There is a predetermined choice, which has been made regarding the supply of a particular good or service which may be supplied from within the same organisation, or from an outside supplier.
The benefits of markets and hierarchies 市场和层次的好处
The relative benefits of these arrangements have been classified in terms of coordination, or transaction costs, and production costs.
Coordination costs involve the costs of searching for information, the costs of negotiating contracts and the risk of opportunistic behaviour.
Production costs involve the primary processes required to produce and distribute the goods in question (Malone, Yates and Benjamin, 1987, p2).
Production costs 生产成本
Production costs are relatively low for goods procured through the market mechanism as buyers can search for the lowest cost and, in a large market, sellers are able to offer lower costs through their scale of production. In a hierarchy production costs are higher as, because there is a predetermined supplier, there is no search of the market for the lowest price.
Coordination costs 协调成本
The coordination costs for markets, however, are higher due to the cost of gathering and comparing information from the suppliers. Buyers also have the cost, actual or implied, of insuring themselves against opportunistic behaviour.
The coordination costs of a hierarchy, in contrast, are lower as the search costs have been eliminated. These relative costs are summarised in the table below.
Organisational form
Production costs
Coordination costs
Markets
Asset specificity and complexity of product description 资产专用性和产品描述的复杂性
Two other factors Malone, Yates and Benjamin pinpoint as crucial, in determining the uses of markets and hierarchies are:
Asset specificity
Complexity of product description.
Asset specificity 资产专用性
This means that an input cannot be easily used by other firms. For example, a highly specialised machine cannot be easily redeployed for another purpose. The types of asset specificity are detailed in the element Transaction cost economics.
Inputs that have high asset specificity will tend to be characterised by hierarchical relationships, because there are fewer alternative buyers and sellers of this product and both the buyer and seller would be vulnerable in a market situation. The seller could at any time refuse to supply leaving the buyer without inputs whilst the buyer could also decline to purchase.
Complexity of product description 产品描述的复杂性
This refers to the quantity of information required about a product to make a purchase decision. Standard products have simple descriptions, e.g. some car components, basic chemicals, printer paper, while more complex products such as business insurance policies or Enterprise Resource Planning software will require more complex descriptions. In general, products with standard descriptions will tend to be acquired through markets whilst those with more complex descriptions will be acquired through hierarchical relationships because increased product complexity increases the coordination costs involved in market based transactions.
The diagram below shows the effect of these two factors on organisational form. The more a product is asset specific and complex in description the more likely it is to be acquired through a hierarchical relationship.
A further factor to be considered here is the sophistication of the buyer. This refers to their ability to define product specifications, how they see differences between sellers and whether they will buy a product before seeing it. More sophisticated buyers will be able to specify less complex product descriptions, or make sense of more complex ones (Berryman et al, 1998).
Impact of e-commerce on the choice between markets and hierarchies 电子商务对市场与层次结构选择的影响
Malone, Yates and Benjamin (1987, p3) argue that as "the essence of coordination involves communicating and exchanging information, the use of information technology seems likely to decrease these costs". The Internet further extends this exchange and decreases these costs even more. They define these effects as follows:
Electronic communication effect
This means more information can be communicated, more cheaply in a set time. This can benefit both markets and hierarchies.Electronic brokerage effect
This fulfils the role of a broker by connecting many buyers and sellers with a central database allowing inappropriate alternatives to be screened out. This can also reduce quality problems and lower coordination costs. This effect will encourage organisations to use markets.
Electronic integration effect
This effect occurs when an organisation and its suppliers integrate their processes. Examples of this are linking databases to facilitate Just In Time (JIT) inventory systems which enable lower inventories to be held. These benefits accrue to hierarchies.
Increasing use of markets 越来越多地使用市场
The arguments put forward by Malone et al (1987) can be developed to analyse the growth of e-commerce markets. These focus on the key points defined earlier.
Coordination costs
Complexity of product description
Asset specificity
E-Commerce and coordination costs 电子商务与协调成本
As observed earlier (Benefits of markets and hierarchies) there are strong arguments for using markets in terms of production costs but they are more costly in terms of coordination costs. As coordination costs have been reduced firstly by information technology and now more so by Internet technologies the relative merits of markets have increased.
E-Commerce and complexity of product description 电子商务与产品描述的复杂性
Product descriptions can now be communicated more easily using the Internet. Diagrams, photographs and, to a lesser extent, videos can be shared via the web as remote communication gains in richness, which enables demonstrations, and can lessen the complexity of a product to the buyer. The advent of broadband connections will accelerate this process. For a discussion of this see Evans and Wurster (2000).
E-Commerce and asset specificity 电子商务与资产专用性
The global reach of the Internet can, in general, lessen asset specificity as sellers can reach a greater audience. We can also see the impact of lower asset specificity with the growth of extranets. Traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) systems which gave the benefits of being able to share information and streamline transactions were limited in their use due to their complexity, cost and proprietary nature. They were thus high in asset specificity due to the cost of switching to another system, which led to organisations being locked in.
Extranets have extended the role of EDI as the advent of open standards allows organisations to share information with a supplier with just a web browser, removing the vulnerability, in terms of lock-in, of adopting EDI enabled systems. However, some organisations have not moved towards market based systems preferring hierarchical relationships with preferred suppliers. A reason for this is that build to order production systems increase the time specificity of components, leaving organisations vulnerable. The gains are the benefits of lower cost through lower inventory.
Malone, Yates and Benjamin (1987) see this as a stage of electronic market development. Whilst an electronic market may initially be biased towards a certain supplier, legal and competitive pressures will force the market to be unbiased in its operation. The development of the health emarketplace, Global Healthcare Exchange, lends support to this argument. In the 1980s the dominant market was seller controlled with the Baxter ASAP system, a form of EDI, which allowed hospitals to order products online from terminals provided by the company. This established hierarchical relationships, as there was one supplier giving the benefits of electronic interconnection and electronic integration. Moreover, features were also built into the system to make it more asset specific achieving a strong degree of lock in.
With the Global Healthcare Exchange we now have a marketplace system, which allows hospitals to access the products of a wide range of suppliers and is open to any supplier.
There are also moves in the financial sector away from hierarchies towards markets. Historically, the financial sector has taken a hierarchical form as its sales function has been supplied internally. However, it is argued that organisations will move towards offering access to their rivals' products in a supermarket style format (Long, 2000, p46). An example of a move to such a supermarket style of operation is Egg who operate EggInsure which offers a range of insurance products. This move is being caused by consumers' improved search ability and increasing competition in the sector.
The argument in favour of a seller offering a more open marketplace (i.e. offering rival products) is that whilst they lose sales, they can gain from the larger marketplace that develops and also retain control of the market.
Trends in Internet markets 互联网市场趋势
We have looked at the trend from biased to unbiased markets. We will now examine other trends such as the impact of electronic markets. These are:
Product offerings
Price discovery
The role of intermediaries
Impact on product offerings 对产品产品的影响
Malone et al (1987) argued personalised markets would develop as a way of overcoming the sheer volume of choice in electronic markets.
Internet technology allows organisations to closely track customer behaviour as patterns of buying behaviour can also be gathered and targeted marketing can then be practised.
Products with high information intensity can also be tailored to individuals at low cost. This is done through registering at web sites and giving information on preferences, which can then be used to assemble a bundle which suits particular needs. The availability of personalised news, personalised stock portfolios, e.g.
Aggregation and disaggregation
Bakos (1998) argues that the Internet has fundamentally altered the logic of bundling products by reducing the costs associated. A bundle is a group of products which are offered for sale together, for example, software and newspapers are both bundled products. He outlines the costs as follows:
Production: The cost of producing additional products for inclusion in the bundle.
Transaction and distribution: The cost of distributing and taking payment for a bundle.
Binding: This is the cost of 'putting together' a bundle of products to be offered for sale. An example may be combining news stories from agencies for a news bundle.
Menu Costs: This is the cost of adjusting prices. In a physical environment this may involve relabelling if appropriate, and at minimum changing the displayed prices. This will depend on the organisation's policies and the legal environment.
With digital goods the traditional economics of aggregation have been transformed. An example of this is the newspaper industry where the high cost of printing and distributing a newspaper led to news items, for example, current affairs, sport, finance and leisure being included in the same bundle to save on cost. Printing and distributing a single article would only be possible at exorbitant cost. However, these costs are now much lower with the advent of the Internet which has thus removed barriers to entry and we now have new entrants offering Internet news. If we look at news organisations, or information providers, we can see the impact of aggregation and disaggregation as many sites now offer personalised news and there has also been the growth of payment for individual items (see ft.com archive) which is because of the reduction in the costs outlined above. Niche news providers have emerged on the Internet covering particular areas, for example, sport, finance, weather, which one could argue are in reality separate products. As stated in Competitive advantage newspapers are vulnerable to the loss of classified advertising, which is part of this bundle, as this is a large part of their revenue.
Electronic markets are also allowing the aggregation of services which were historically provided separately. Bakos (1998) gives the example of a consumer purchasing a car where the provision of product information, finance and insurance were usually done by different parties. The lowering of transaction, distribution and binding costs has enabled the likes of Autobytel to aggregate these goods and services, "with the exception of the test drive" (Bakos, 1998, p5).
Price discovery 价格发现
Electronic markets, with lower menu costs, and the ability to personalise and customise, have enabled a wider range of price discovery methods to be employed. In general, we are seeing a move away from fixed pricing and as we discussed in classical microeconomic theory: market structure and the new economy there are opportunities for price discrimination.
It can be asked, however, whether flexible pricing is a preferable situation, as a common experience of flexible pricing, namely the car showroom, is not generally seen as a pleasurable experience (Marti, 2000).
New roles for intermediaries 中介机构的新角色
Electronic markets are creating new opportunities for intermediaries. These are becoming important in reducing search costs, in the area of logistics as products are shipped directly to customers, and in the issue of trust. We will cover this subject in more depth in Disintermediation and intermediation.
Auctions 拍卖
Auctions are a particular form of market which have proliferated in all segments of e-commerce. In contrast to conventional auctions where the bidding is synchronous, i.e. it occurs at the same time, many of these auctions are asynchronous, i.e., bids can be placed until a certain time. Business-to-business auctions give the example of synchronous auctions. For example, FreeMarkets auctions operate using proprietary software with participants connected to their network.
These auctions include:
Open bid auctions, where all bids are observable. Open bid auctions operate with increasing bids which continue until the highest bid is placed by the person with the highest valuation. These are seen as most effective "for single or limited numbers of items" (Stone, Woodcock and Machtynger, p208)
Sealed bid auctions, in contrast, are not observable. In a single stage sealedbid auction bidders have to submit their bids without knowing the other bidders' valuations.
Dutch auctions, which are the opposite to a bid auction with increasing prices. The auctioneer starts off with a relatively 'high' bid, above the valuation of bidders, and then decreases the price. The first bidder to accept a price wins the auction. These are seen as most effective "for liquidating inventory" (Stone, Woodcock and Machtynger, p208).
Reverse auctions, where the buyer specifies their requirements and the sellers then compete for the sale. These can be open (freemarkets.com) or sealed bid (moneysupermarket.co.uk).
Functions of auctions 拍卖的功能
Klein and O'Keefe (1998) note the functions of auctions as price formation, clearing perishable products or excess stock, and as a highly visible distribution mechanism.
Price formation
Auctions are an efficient way of establishing prices and can be even more so with Internet auctions as they increase the numbers of buyers and sellers. For example, in an isolated area products in an auction may have much higher/lower prices than elsewhere due to lack of supply or demand in the area.
Auctions can be used to discover the price for something which is not usually traded and is therefore difficult to value, for example, a fine work of art or, as has been seen on eBay, the auction of a Russian submarine.
Clearing perishable products or excess stock
Auctions have been used as a way of clearing conventional channels of perishable products (e.g. the most common is travel, whilst media and logistics are emerging). Excess stock can also be cleared in this way with, for example, fastparts auctioning excess electronic components.
Furthermore, auctions can be used as a form of price discrimination segmenting the buyer group into those who prefer a higher fixed price because of convenience, ignorance or fear of auctions, and those who will accept the uncertainty and effort to gain a lower price through auctions.
Highly visible distribution mechanism
In this case auctions are used to gain publicity. A limited number of a product are auctioned off, e.g. Lufthansa. This may be either for the benefit of the
Reverse auctions 反向拍卖
In this scenario the buyer states the maximum price they are prepared to pay for a product and the intermediary who controls the market then invites participating organisations to bid, or tender, for the purchase. MoneySupermarket , who offer reverse auctions for mortgages, (currently with a minimum loan of Â￡150,000), Pintos and Priceline provide examples. With the MoneySupermarket example there are advantages for the lender as they can vary their offer to reflect the risk associated with a particular client, and the minimum loan of Â￡150,000 is also attractive to lenders as there are savings in underwriting a single larger loan than several smaller loans, which amount to the same value (MoneySupermarket, 2000). They can also bid aggressively for business when their conventional business is quiet and withdraw, or offer uncompetitive bids, when business is good. On the buyer side the advantage is that vendors are obliged to improve on their normal rates.
MoneySupermarket stated on their website that they had received over Â￡100 million of mortgage applications through the reverse auction process in its first week of operation (MoneySupermarket 2000). In the USA reverse mortgage auctioning is more established, with, for example, IMX generating "billions of dollars of business a year" (Jenkins, 2000, p5). There are, however, costs to the lenders in preparing a detailed quote which may fail.
Market efficiency 市场效率
A major question that is asked is whether e-commerce markets are more efficient than conventional markets. To consider this we will summarise research by Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson (1999) in the following areas:
Price elasticity
Menu costs
Price dispersion
Price 价格
"Efficiency is maximised when all welfare enhancing trades are executed" (Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999, p4). As we saw in the element on Classical microeconomic theory: market structure and the new economy, efficiency involves price being set at marginal cost so it follows that if price is set above marginal cost the level of production will below the optimal amount.
We would expect e-commerce markets to have lower prices for the following reasons.
Low barriers to entry - If excess profits are being made rival firms will be attracted to the market pushing price towards marginal cost.
Low search costs - If consumers' search costs are lowered then firms will be unable to charge a premium.
Lower production costs - If the costs of production are lowered then, other things remaining equal, prices can be lowered.
However as Bakos writes interestingly, if entry costs are lower without perfect information the result can be higher prices as search costs increase (Bakos, 1998, p11). Moreover, with the low marginal costs of digital products sellers are unlikely to use marginal cost pricing and will often charge what customers are prepared to pay (value based pricing).
There is conflicting evidence on this issue. An early study by Lee found that prices were higher in electronic markets than in conventional markets (Quoted by Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999). This study, however, looked at auction markets and as Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson argue, higher prices in auction markets can be seen as a sign of efficiency, as efficiency in auction markets occurs when the product is sold to the bidder with the highest valuation. There were also issues of methodology asthe products in the two markets had significant differences. Firstly, they were newer, which would increase value, and secondly they had been through additional quality checks, which would again increase buyer valuations.
In another study Bailey (quoted in Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999 ) compared Internet markets with conventional markets during 1996 and 1997, looking at CDs, books and software. He found prices were higher through the e-commerce channel for each product. Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson (1999) argue these goods are entirely homogenous and that the explanation is thus not to be found in heterogeneity. Bailey (quoted in Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999 ) sees the explanation as market immaturity. However, as we noted in Classical microeconomic theory: market structure and the new economy these markets are characterised by differentiation through non price factors such as customer service and brand value which may help to explain the higher prices. It should also be remembered that the demographics of the Internet user could support higher prices as the Internet user typically has a higher level of income than average.
A later study by Brynjolfsson and Smith (quoted in Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999) which looked at CDs and books found prices on the Internet were 9-16% cheaper than in conventional channels. It may be that in the intervening period Internet markets became more efficient. However, it is difficult to directly compare the research as the samples used were not consistent.
Elasticity of demand 需求弹性
Price elasticity of demand shows how responsive consumers are to changes in price. In efficient markets demand will be highly sensitive, or responsive, as search costs are low and substitute products exist due to low barriers to entry.
Evidence 证实
Research found that US consumers are highly sensitive to local taxes when purchasing on-line where these taxes can be avoided. It found that on-line demand is highly sensitive to the price of products in conventional outlets (Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999).
Another study, which looked at groceries, found that price elasticity is less elastic amongst on line shoppers than for those in the physical world (Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999). On-line shoppers may also be able to more easily find the products which match their needs which may lead to less 'browsing'. Missing information may also lead buyers to rely more on other indicators such as brand as studies have shown retailers with both an off and on-line presence can charge a premium over their pure play rivals.
Menu costs 菜单成本
These are the costs involved when prices are adjusted. Higher menu costs will make organisations less willing to make price changes, especially small ones and will hinder market efficiency. Menu costs are lower in an on-line environment where a central change to a database is all that is required, compared to the costs of changing prices in a physical environment, where displays and labels, if used, have to be changed (Bakos 1998).
Evidence 证实
Research in this area has confirmed that menu costs are lower and that on-line retailers are far more likely to make small price changes than those in the physical world (Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999). However, the existence of low menu costs is not necessarily a move to efficiency as this can be used to increase consumers' search costs, by maintaining an array of different prices, which are more frequently changed. Bakos (1998) argues this may be used by sellers as a defensive weapon against the improved ability buyers have to search.
Price dispersion 价格离散
Market efficiency will see the same price charged for a particular product. Explanations for price dispersion are high search costs, imperfect information and the importance of non-price factors. As search costs are lower on the Internet we would expect there to be less price dispersion. However, a range of prices can be found on the Internet for the same product.
Evidence 证实
Price dispersion can easily be observed by a price comparison at ShopSmart or kelkoo. However, this understates its degree as the higher cost retailers may not take part and the samples are also small.
Research by Brynjolfsson and Smith has confirmed that price dispersion exists on the Internet. (Quoted in Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999). They found prices for books and CDs have differed by up to 50%, giving reasons which include market immaturity and the importance of non-price factors. Again, perhaps the motivations of on-line shoppers are not price driven and other factors are more important. It is also noted that consumers are less likely to aggressively search for lower cost items, such as CDs and books (Smith, Bailey and Brynjolfsson, 1999).
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