The impact of shopbot use on prices and price dispersion: Evidence from online book retailing

This paper examines the impact of changes in shopbot use over time on pricing behavior in the Internet book market. We do this by combining price and clickstream data collected from August 1999 to July 2001 - a period of rapid expansion in shopbot use. We find that a 1% increase in shopbot use is correlated with a $0.41 decrease in price levels and a 1.1% decrease in price dispersion.