Features of Price Setting Behavior in the Moscow E-Commerce Market

Alexey S. Evseev – Junior Researcher of the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (Moscow, Russia). E-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This paper studies features of price setting behavior in the Moscow e-commerce market. We find that the median time between price changes of 38 days. This result is comparable to the findings of a similar study for the US e-commerce market (39.1 days), but higher than in Italy (29.8 days) or France (23.6 days). We also find that the frequency of price changes differs dramatically across goods as well as among retailers. Around 6.4% of regular price changes are smaller than 1% in absolute value, which indicates support for the concept of menu costs.

Key words: price setting, e-commerce market, menu costs, price changes.