Price dispersion analysis of Xbox 360 in online Swedish markets using K-Means clustering and ggplot2 visualisations.
Using the pricing data collected from a price comparison website of products belonging to the Xbox 360 category, we tried to identify if price dispersion exists for homogeneous products across multiple online retailers in this market and whether intertemporal price discrimination is the reason behind price dispersion. Price dispersion is substantially present in this market and is increasing with time. Our results show that some retailers are following randomised pricing and trying to undercut each other. Their behaviour reflects the theory of intertemporal price discrimination that suggests retailers should be randomising their prices over time to avoid price pattern identification by consumers. However, many retailers practice persistent pricing over time and are not worried about consumers learning their pricing patterns. Therefore, it suggests that intertemporal price discrimination is likely not the reason for price dispersion for most products. The clearinghouse model is thus not entirely supported by our analysis.
This analysis was done as part of the Data Analysis and Visualization course held at Dalarna University for the master in the data science program to showcase visual literacy skills with ggplot2. The task was to aid regulators and retailers' decision-making by providing them with insights by analysing retailers' pricing on a price comparison website. The findings were to be reported and visually presented in a meaningful way using basic time-series graphical representations, summary statistics of distributions, and other means of visually representing the data in intuitive ways, preferably clustering.
The analysis is presented in PriceDispersionAnalysisReport.pdf and the code for analysis in price_dispersion_analysis.R. The code is in R; hence, R and optional tools like RStudio are required to run the code. In addition, the images used in the report are present separately for easy access to the information.
However, this repository does not provide the data used for analysis.
Saumya Gupta guptasaumya79@gmail.com
M. M. Usman Zahid uzahid@gmail.com
This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.