Abstract
Interactive marketing now exceeds a trillion dollars in sales and is growing at 10% per annum (www.census.gov/estats). The growth in online transactional activity raises a fundamental question: Is there anything really different about the theory or practice of pricing strategies online versus off-line? In other words, do pricing phenomena change simply because transactions have migrated from stores and catalogues to computer-mediated interfaces? Can pricing theory and strategies remain invariant regardless of whether firms post prices online or off-line and regardless of whether customers access and respond to prices online or off-line? This special issue provides insights into these questions by examining a wide variety of online pricing phenomena. Top scholars in the fields of marketing and economics shed light on important issues regarding consumers’ participation in setting prices, the use and abuse of online ratings, the processing of price and coupon information, and the economics of online price dispersion. Next, we elucidate these four issues and highlight the contributions of the nine articles comprising this special issue.
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