Tanja Frischmann’s research while affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt and other places

The Internet has radically reduced the cost of collecting and distributing information. Consequently, researchers initially predicted that the resulting price transparency would drive prices toward a single market price. However, this has largely not happened, partly because retailers use shipping costs to make prices less comparable. Using data on 517,048 offers of 895 retailers from a leading European price comparison site, we show that retailers pursue two different shipping cost strategies. Both strategies lead to higher gross product prices, which are the sum of net product price and shipping costs and thus try to capture consumer surplus. These strategies are conflicting, however, and target different consumer segments: Some retailers charge high shipping costs and thereby try to exploit consumers' biased perceptions of partitioned prices, while other retailers offer "free shipping" to attract consumers and exploit their so-called zero-risk bias. Consumers realize the lowest gross product prices by ordering at retailers that charge moderate shipping costs.

Accountability of marketing actions is a topic of ongoing interest. In accordance with the growing importance of the subject, a multitude of customer metrics has been developed intended to measure and value marketing investments and link their returns to financial results and performance. Managers widely acknowledge the need for quantitative measures of marketing performance but now face the challenge of deciding which metrics to measure and how to interpret them. One of the main difficulties lies in the interdependencies of metrics. Those interdependencies may lead to serious misinterpretation and have been widely neglected in the existing literature. Therefore, this study empirically tests if the influence of customer perceptual metrics (for example, customer satisfaction) on customer profitability persists when customer behavioural metrics are considered. We use data from a large European financial service provider. Our findings support the relevance of mediating effects of customer behavioural metrics (for example, cross-selling ratio) on the relationship between customer perceptual metrics and customer profitability. The article contributes significantly to the body of knowledge about interdependencies between different customer metric combinations by considering direct and indirect links, testing for mediator effects, and evaluating their impact on customer profitability.

ShopBots allow consumers to compare product offerings of online retailers and can thereby significantly reduce consumers' search costs. Although it was expected that these comparisons would pull prices down to a single market price, prices in online markets have not even come close to those expectations. In this paper we show how retailers influence the quality of data and thereby successfully pursue strategies making products and prices hardly comparable. We find a notable amount of bundles in highly competitive product categories and show how retailers exploit consumers' biased perception in terms of partitioned prices. Finally, we argue that with recent business models, it is very unlikely that ShopBots fulfil the promise of market transparency.