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Consumer Search in Retail Gasoline Markets
Author(s) -
Byrne David P.,
de Roos Nicolas
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
the journal of industrial economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.93
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1467-6451
pISSN - 0022-1821
DOI - 10.1111/joie.12119
Subject(s) - exploit , price dispersion , measure (data warehouse) , gasoline , econometrics , economics , simple (philosophy) , business , microeconomics , computer science , data mining , engineering , computer security , philosophy , epistemology , waste management
This paper develops direct tests for search behavior in retail gasoline markets. We exploit a unique market‐level dataset that allows us to directly measure search intensity with daily web traffic data from a gasoline price reporting website and perfectly measure daily changes in price levels and dispersion. Our simple yet powerful tests provide strong evidence of both cross‐sectional and intertemporal price search.