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 … Read More
online pricing
Price Fixing Roundup
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. … Read More
Sacre Bleu! Top Paris Hotels Fined for Price Fixing
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 … Read More
Amazon to Sell Pricing Data
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 … Read More
Next Gen Price Comparison Sites
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 … Read More
Record Companies Unhappy with iTunes Pricing
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 … Read More