The booms and busts in U.S. stock prices over the post-war period can to a large extent be explained by fluctuations in investors' subjective capital gains expectations. Survey measures of these expectations display excessive optimism at market peaks and excessive pessimism at market throughs....

This paper introduces directed search into the sequential search model of Diamond (1971) by allowing buyers to observe the distribution of prices charged by two (or more) distinct subgroups of firms in the market. This enables buyers to direct their searches towards the most desirable group of...