Retail and financial services firm GUS bought price comparison site operator PriceGrabber for $485M. PriceGrabber allows consumers to compare prices on a wide variety of items. The site makes money through referrals, so in some ways it’s more of an advertising medium than a true price comparison tool. While the lofty purchase price might bring [...]
On the heels of yesterday’s post on price fixing in the luxury Paris hotel market, here are a number of other in that vein. European Commission fines plastic bag makers, and presents evidence that managers knew their actions were illegal. Samsung pleaded guilty to price fixing in the memory chip market. DeBeers agreed to pay [...]
The French Competition Council fined six very fancy hotels between 55,000 and 248,000 Euro for illegally colluding to maintain high prices. How high? Over E700 (about $850) per night. These are some of the finest hotels in the world and they were apparently sending each other detailed emails about occupancy rates, room rates, and other [...]
In an intriguing move, Amazon is selling access to pricing information from its vast data warehouse in a project called Amazon Historical Pricing. The program allows users to submit queries through Amazon’s web services API to track the price and of various items over time. This helps to detect seasonal trends or the impact of [...]
An alert reader sent in this WSJ article on The Next Generation of Price-Comparison Sites. Price comparison websites are almost as old as the internet as a commerce medium. The idea is that the internet would facilitate an Adam-Smith-like perfect market of perfect information. Bill Gates described a “friction-free economy”, which others pointed out meant [...]
Some of the major record labels** are pushing Apple to abandon its one-price-fits-all policy and allow higher prices on hit songs and possibly even lower prices on less popular tunes. From a pricing theory perspective, this makes perfect sense. A demand curve that varies greatly across products should lead to variable price levels across products. [...]
