Given these measures, we form a proxy measure of SLR
(φi) as the ratio of search share (a switcher metric) to the
normalized page views per user (a loyalty metric). Values
appear in Table 3, which orders the retailers by decreasing
SLR. Note that the three largest retailers—Amazon.com,
B&N, and Books-A-Million—have SLRs in the middle
range. For the smaller firms, the SLR separates those with a
high SLR (e.g., eCampus) from those with a low SLR (e.g.,
Varsity), enabling a test of H3. For example, although
eCampus and Varsity have nearly the same popularity and
page views per user, the SLR is higher for eCampus than
for Varsity. We now show empirically that the relative SLRs
explain the discounting behavior of the retailers, consistent
with our model predictions.