Oren Rigbi

The Effects of Price Transparency in Food Retail Markets

Oren Rigbi has been working on the economics of food retail markets. In a recent working paper, he and his co-author explore how mandatory disclosure of supermarket prices affects prices and price dispersion in brick-and-mortar stores. They use a transparency regulation that recently went into effect in the Israeli food retail market together with several complementary control groups, and rely on a differences-in-differences research design. The findings show a sharp and immediate decline in price dispersion as well as a slower price decrease of 4-5%. They show that the magnitude of the price decrease is correlated with the penetration of price-comparison websites, and highlight the role of media coverage in encouraging retailers to set lower prices.

Mr Rigbi is an applied microeconomist who specialises in the fields of industrial organisation and law & economics. His earlier research projects investigate how the organisational structure of law enforcement agencies affect police activity and crime, and the broad consequences of extending criminal suspects' right to counsel. He has also studied person-to-person online loan markets, focusing on the way these markets are shaped by legal interest rate restrictions and social distances between borrowers and lenders.

During his visit to CESifo, Mr Rigbi plans to pursue a project that examines retailers' utilisation of changes in the quality of service as a way to deter entry in the context of online food purchases.

Oren Rigbi is a Senior Lecturer ("associate professor") in the Department of Economics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford University in 2009.