Price Dispersion in Online Board Game Retail

Price dispersion describes the phenomenon that largely identical products are offered at different prices within the same market. Early theories assumed insufficiently informed consumers to be the central factor behind this.

In online retail shaped by price comparison websites (so-called clearing houses), comprehensive knowledge of market participants’ offer prices can be obtained with little effort. Our study aims to revisit seemingly irrational loyal-customer behavior among segments of consumers as an explanatory approach for observed price dispersion in real data from the German board game market, alongside structural factors such as price switching costs in the context of inflation dynamics.