Participatory Sensing in Commerce: Using Mobile Camera Phones to Track Market Price Dispersion

In economics, price dispersion refers to the price difference of a homogeneous good across different vendors. According to [1] “The empirical evidence suggests that price dispersion in both online and offline markets is sizeable, pervasive, and persistent.” Not surprisingly, there exist several popular web commerce sites such as Froogle that enable users to track consumer pricing information in online markets. In this paper, we present and explore our vision that participatory sensing can be employed in this new application domain to track price dispersion in homogeneous consumer goods even in offline markets. We discuss two proof-of-concept participatory mobile camera-phone sensing systems that we have built: (1) automating fuel price collection, and (2) semi-automated scanning of receipts.