We study a canonical model of decentralized exchange for a durable good or asset, where agents are assumed to have time-varying, heterogeneous utility types. Whereas the existing literature has focused on the special case of two types, we allow agents' utility to be drawn from an arbitrary...

We study mergers in a market where N firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices. The main motivation for such an analysis is that mergers generally affect market prices and thereby, in a search environment, the search behavior of consumers. Endogenous...

Despite the mixed empirical evidence, many economists stillhold to the view that Internet will promote competition betweenfirms,thereby lowering prices and increasing economic welfare. This paperpresents a search model that provides a different view. We analyzethemarket for a homogeneous good...

In a recent paper Hong and Shum [2006. Using price distributions to estimate search costs. Rand Journal of Economics 37, 257–275] present a structural method to estimate search cost distributions. We extend their approach to the case of oligopoly and present a new maximum likelihood method to...

We investigate the impact of consumer search and competition on pricing strategies in Germany’s electricity retail. We utilize a unique panel dataset on spatially varying search requests at major online price comparison websites to construct a direct measure of search intensity and combine...