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October 24, 2006

DIY International Arbitrage

The authors of a forthcoming Economics Letters article (pdf) gathered data from Amazon's American, British, and Canadian web sites to demonstrate international price discrimination. According to the authors, Americans pay significantly more for textbooks on average. They offer a number of demand-side hypotheses but do not test them.

I've found a number of cases where American customers can save money by purchasing their textbooks from amazon.co.uk and paying for international shipping (£6.98) rather than using amazon.com. Check it out:

Title Authors
.com
.co.uk
$ diff
 % diff
Mathematics for Economists Simon & Blume 126.74 84.69 42.05 33
Advanced Macroeconomics Romer 56.25 83.56 -27.31 -49
Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data Wooldridge 80 89.98 -9.98 -12
Economics for Business Sloman 95 73.39 21.61 23
Mathematics for Economics and Business Jacques 115 75.84 39.16 34
Options, Futures and Other Derivatives Hull 158.99 88.45 70.54 44
Statistics for Business and Economics Newbold et al. 153.33 91.84 61.49 40
Introductory Econometrics for Finance Brooks 35.5 61.17 -25.67 -72
Statistics for Economics, Accounting and Business Studies Barrow 100 75.84 24.16 24
Microeconomics: Principles and Analysis Cowell 78.35 79.32 -0.97 -1

Prices reported in USD with an exchange rate of 1.88 USD per GBP.

Posted by Dingel at October 24, 2006 06:34 PM

Comments

Watch out for the duty. I had to pay more duty on a book I had sent from Amazon.co.uk to Canada than the original price of the volume. (It was not yet released in North America)

Posted by: Milan at October 25, 2006 01:14 AM

This is also the case with research more generally. I have found that a lot of academic papers are free for people outside the OECD (or something) but people from more developed countries face a charge. I guess this is price discrimination and helps to allow the dissemination of research.

Posted by: Rob at October 26, 2006 10:12 AM