Hugo Jonker (Open University Netherlands), Stefan Karsch (TH Koln), Benjamin Krumnow (TH Koln), Godfried Meesters (Open University Netherlands)

Online vendors typically offer different stores to sell their items, such as desktop site, mobile site, country-specific sites, etc. Online rumours and news media reports persist that item prices between such views differ. While several academic works have investigated price differentiation, to date, no systematic method for analysing this question was put forth. We devise an approach to investigate such store-based price differentiation, based on three pillars: a framework that can perform cross-store data acquisition synchronously, a method to perform cross-store item matching, and constraints to limit client-side noise factors. We test our method in an initial case study to investigate store effects on flight pricing. We gather pricing data of 824 flights from 15 stores (incl. desktop sites, mobile apps, and mobile sites) over a 38-day period. Our experiment shows that price differences occur frequently. Moreover, even in a limited run we find strong indications of store-specific pricing for certain vendors. We conclude that (i) a larger study into store-based price differentiation is needed to better gauge this effect; (ii) future research in this general domain should take store-based differences into account in their study design.

View More Papers

Death By A Thousand COTS: Disrupting Satellite Communications using...

Frederick Rawlins, Richard Baker and Ivan Martinovic (University of Oxford) Presenter: Frederick Rawlins

Read More

CROW: Code Diversification for WebAssembly

Javier Cabrera Arteaga, Orestis Floros, Benoit Baudry, Martin Monperrus (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Oscar Vera Perez (Univ Rennes, Inria, CNRS, IRISA)

Read More

Augmented Reality’s Potential for Identifying and Mitigating Home Privacy...

Stefany Cruz (Northwestern University), Logan Danek (Northwestern University), Shinan Liu (University of Chicago), Christopher Kraemer (Georgia Institute of Technology), Zixin Wang (Zhejiang University), Nick Feamster (University of Chicago), Danny Yuxing Huang (New York University), Yaxing Yao (University of Maryland), Josiah Hester (Georgia Institute of Technology)

Read More