Does Internet Increase the Market Efficiency?

인터넷이 시장의 효율성을 증가시키는가?

The Internet is taking up every single life of us with a huge speed of growth. If the ideal market called 'perfect competition' in economics will ever come true in this digital world, the sellers won't be able to have monopolistic profits above the marginal cost any more, letting the resource allocation much more efficient. This paper attempts to test whether this theory is true in e-market as well through observing price differences between online and offline retailers of extremely homogeneous products, CDs. Since most results from previous research were supporting the inefficiency of e-market in price level, price adjustment, and especially price dispersion, this article designed the research methodology most carefully. The results of pervious works are partly due to the immaturity of the Internet market or due to the uniqueness of the American CD market, where oligopolistic market players are significantly dominant. The analysis of price data of 20 titles from 20 retailers for five weeks supports that online market is more efficient than offline market with statistical significance in all the three dimensions. We could conclude that the e-market is going much more efficient at least compared to the offline market and the more would it be unless the sellers resist and prevent comparison-shopping.