One product, two costs: The border impact in retail costs

Teresa Messner, Fabio Rumler and Georg Strasser in this voxeu article:

The ‘legislation of 1 value’ states that, in a frictionless world, the value of a product offered in two nations needs to be the identical. This column examines value variations throughout a nationwide border the place most elements generally used to elucidate worldwide value variations are absent. Whereas some merchandise price the identical on either side of the border between Austria and Germany, most costs differ considerably. The authors present that even retailers working in each nations cost totally different costs for equivalent merchandise on either side of the border.

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Our work has three essential implications. First, it reveals that retailers follow cross-border value discrimination. Because of this they maximise income individually in every nation, even inside the EU. This means that the price of arbitrage stays sufficiently excessive – probably owing to data price (i.e. the efforts folks should make to acquire data on costs) – to discourage many shoppers from exploiting these value variations.

Second, even inside a completely built-in area a nationwide border can have an effect on costs. Nationwide borders can nonetheless matter even inside the EU as a result of the evolution of logistics networks and advertising areas is rooted in historical past. Present distribution networks developed at a time when cross-border commerce was extra difficult than these days. The discovering that value discrimination coincides geographically with the nationwide border is thus possible a legacy of the financial borders of the previous, and their impact is fading away solely slowly.

The third discovering is that though the legislation of 1 value fails, it does maintain true in a relative sense: inflation charges are comparable on either side of the border. Frequent price shocks transfer costs in each nations in the identical path, however product-specific pricing dominates the border impact. Subsequently, the border impact by itself is unlikely to have an effect on the transmission of financial coverage.

In conclusion, our examine means that retailers have appreciable market energy vis-à-vis shoppers, with the border impact pointing to retailers selecting to use value differentiation – for historic causes – based mostly on current distribution networks.

This entry was posted on Might 4, 2023 at 3:09 pm and is filed underneath Academic research & research papers, Economics – macro, micro etc, Growth and development. You possibly can observe any responses to this entry via the RSS 2.0 feed.
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