June 2001

IZA DP No. 315: On Price-Setting for Identical Products in Markets without Formal Trade Barriers

This paper investigates price-setting for truly homogenous products sold in markets without any formal trade barriers. We use data from IKEA, a furniture company selling identical products in an identical shopping environment in different EU countries. We get four remarkable outcomes: 1) The law of one price does not hold. 2) Country-specific effects of non-tradable cost components are important. 3) Pricing to the market surely occurs but price discrimination is limited by incomplete information. 4) The unexplained part of between-country price variation for identical products is about 75% which leaves most of the inter-country price variation unexplained.