Browsing by Subject "online prices"

Increased awareness in health issues and nutritional elements has derived consumers to pay premium prices for functional products and producers have developed differentiated products to match these heterogenous preferences. The assessment of the versatile food commodity markets has long intrigued the attention of researchers and it is well-established that the hedonic pricing method is a prominent approach in determining an attribute's cost and perceived value to customers. With the method of hedonic pricing, this study aims to determine how those values form the online prices of bread. Specifically, it examines the marginal prices of bread sold on e-commerce platforms in Finland and whether those change over time. Moreover, this study aims to analyze the extent to which complex data extraction methods add value to prior hedonic pricing methodologies. To test the null hypotheses that estimated marginal prices have no relationship to online prices of bread, and the marginal prices of bread attributes do not significantly change during the data collection period, a semi-logarithmic hedonic price function with HAC standard errors was specified. In the empirical part, the hedonic price function was estimated for the whole sample and each data day. Daily price quotes for the analysis were extracted from the largest Finnish grocery retailer's e-commerce platform via web scraping. The results showed that the estimated relationships between price and marginal prices were significant but that the effects on the price did not significantly change during the data collection period. The results suggest that Finnish consumers value taste over health and place a high value on stomach-friendly and domestic bread. These findings are a valuable source for better understanding regular bread purchasing decisions and producer product differentiation strategies. Although web scraping was the only alternative to obtain detailed, up-to-date product data in the Finnish context, daily scraping seemed unnecessary as bread prices remained stable. However, daily scraping combined with the hedonic pricing method yielded valuable information regarding the holiday season’s pricing strategies of Finnish retailers. On this basis, web scraping should be included in hedonic pricing applications on food products and the whole food commodity research field.