Are Online and Offline Prices Similar? Evidence from Large Multi-Channel Retailers

Financial support for this research was provided by the JFRAP at MIT Sloan and the NBER's Economics of Digitization and Copyright Initiative. I thank Maria Fazzolari for her outstanding work implementing and coordinating all the offline data collection. I also thank the MIT and Wellesley University students that collected some of the offline data: Vivian Xi, Maurizio Boano, Sibo Wang, Descartes Holland, Sabrina Lui, Suh Yoon, Holly Zhu, Sean Bingham, Elizabeth Krauthamer, Jeffrey Zhang, William Rodriguez, Wenxin Zhang, Jake Amereno, Ivy Jiang, Diya Mo, Qi Jin, Riley Quinn, Do Yeon Park, Jung Hyun Choi, Xiaoxi Wang, Aaroshi Sahgal, Isaiah Udotong, Giulio Capolino, Tanya Bakshi, Allison Davanzo, Karen Pulido, and Bailey Tregoning. I greatly benefited from the comments and suggestions by the Editor and anonymous referee, as well as seminar participants at the Ottawa Group, MIT Sloan, NBER/CIRW Summer Institute, and the UNECE/ILO Meeting of the Group of Experts on Consumer Price Indices. The Appendix that accompanies the paper can be found on the authors web page, together with the data and replication materials. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

• Data Appendix and Replication Materials

• March 31, 2016
• April 20, 2016