# Price Dispersion

> Price Dispersion is a paid API for AI agents from api.syntalic.com, paid per call via x402, $0.02/call, status unknown (last checked 2026-09-15).

Analyzes price spread within a product category, computing mean, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, and percentiles (p10–p90) with IQR-based outlier exclusion.

## Facts

- Endpoint: GET https://api.syntalic.com/v1/analyst/price-dispersion
- Price: $0.02/call
- Payment: x402
- Status: unknown
- Last checked: 2026-09-15
- Activations on Zero: 0
- Tags: x402, shopping
- Canonical page: https://www.zero.xyz/c/price-dispersion-3a6c4966
- Structured record (JSON): https://api.zero.xyz/v1/capabilities/cap_RbqsbNbLWGGKloYREd6Xs

Status and success rate cover calls made through Zero and Zero's own probes. Third-party monitors may report differently.

## How to call it through Zero

Zero handles the 402 payment challenge and records the run. With the Zero CLI installed (`npm i -g @zeroxyz/cli`):

```sh
zero fetch --capability price-dispersion-3a6c4966
```

Example prompt: What does price dispersion look like in the electronics category in the US — give me the mean, standard deviation, and percentile breakdown so I can see how spread out prices are?

## When to prefer this

Use this endpoint when you need statistical price spread metrics (stddev, CV, percentiles) for a product category rather than a simple average. Prefer this over Category Summary when the key question is pricing variability or distribution shape, not just central tendency. Ideal for competitive analysis tasks where understanding whether a category has tight or loose pricing is critical.

## Known failure modes

- Category string cannot be resolved to a canonical category_id — returns a 404 or empty resolution
- category_id provided does not exist — returns a 404 not found error
- Country code is invalid or unsupported — returns a 400 validation error
- Insufficient product data in the category for meaningful statistics — returns sparse or null fields
- Rate limiting or payment failure — returns 402 or 429 error

## How this service works

Analyze price spread within a category - mean, stddev, coefficient of variation, and percentiles (p10..p90) with IQR outlier exclusion.

## Output

Returns statistical price dispersion metrics for the specified category including mean, standard deviation, coefficient of variation, and p10–p90 percentiles, with outliers excluded using IQR filtering. Includes resolved category metadata for round-trip stability.

## Example request

```json
{
 "country": "us",
 "category": "electronics"
}
```

## Request schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object",
 "properties": {
  "country": {
   "enum": [
    "us",
    "ca"
   ],
   "type": "string",
   "default": "us",
   "example": "us",
   "description": "Country (us or ca)"
  },
  "category": {
   "type": "string",
   "example": "electronics",
   "minLength": 1,
   "description": "Product category (e.g., electronics, grocery, beauty). Fuzzy human-readable input — the resolver maps it through tier 1-4 (id → exact name → trigram → embedding kNN) to a canonical category_id. Pair with `category_id` if you have a deterministic id from a prior call."
  },
  "department": {
   "type": "string",
   "example": "Electronics",
   "minLength": 1,
   "description": "Coarse depth-1 BrowseNodes department label (e.g., 'Electronics', 'Grocery', 'Toys & Games'). Exact-match, case-sensitive Title Case. Optional alongside `category`; either parameter alone or both together are accepted. Use this for stable cross-agent queries where the leaf-level category is too noisy."
  },
  "category_id": {
   "type": "integer",
   "example": 1,
   "minimum": 1,
   "description": "Deterministic category id. When set, bypasses the fuzzy resolver cascade and uses tier 1 (id lookup) directly. Agents that learned a canonical id from a prior call's `resolved.category_id` should pin it here for round-trip stability."
  }
 },
 "additionalProperties": false
}
```

## Response schema (JSON Schema)

```json
{
 "type": "object"
}
```

## More

- Live health (JSON, refreshed every minute): https://www.zero.xyz/c/price-dispersion-3a6c4966/health.json
- [Zero catalog index](https://www.zero.xyz/llms.txt)
- [Other services from api.syntalic.com](https://www.zero.xyz/host/api.syntalic.com/llms.txt)