Book price dispersion in Polish online bookstores

The goal of the article is to analyse differences in prices on the Polish online bookstore market. According to the expectations of many researchers, electronic markets should be a good approximation of the perfect competition market, i.e. a single price should exist there. Previous studies in other countries have not confirmed these expectations and price dispersion was observed in markets of homogeneous goods (such as books, CDs and DVDs). Moreover, dispersion was sometimes higher than in traditional markets. The paper presents the results of previous studies on price dispersion of homogeneous goods sold online and describes factors that may be causing this variation. The conducted research includes 10 books that were best-sellers on the Polish market when the article was being written. It was assumed that consumers looking for books online can choose among a variety of tools – search engines or shopping bots. Therefore, the study attempted to find out which of these tools were the most effective in finding the best offer.