주유소의 제품별 유류가격분산에 관한 실증연구: 소비자의 탐색편익과 탐색빈도를 중심으로 = An Empirical Study on the Retail Gasoline Price Dispersion

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This paper investigates price dispersion using retail gasoline prices data in Seoul from April to October in 2008. Especially this study sheds light on the role of customers` search costs and purchase frequency on price dispersion as Stigler(1961) points out in his seminal paper on the economics of information. Our estimation result suggests that price dispersion of the retail gasoline market is larger in the order of premium, regular gasoline and diesel. These results are largely consistent with the notion that price dispersion is positively correlated with the share on a particular good of consumers` budget basket. More interestingly this paper emphasizes the importance of purchase frequency on price dispersion. To test this hypothesis, we make an assumption that purchase frequence is non-decreasing monotonicity for retail gasoline price spike. This is plausible since most customers make a won-based purchase decision, instead of quantity based one, when they run out of gasoline. From this, we find that price dispersion gets smaller in the timing of price spike, which is more frequent purchase period, in our sample. In addition, our estimation results suggest that price-cost margin is positively correlated with price dispersion. This implies that price-cost margin gets smaller as price dispersion diminishes.

참고문헌 (Reference)

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