Web search technologies are fundamental tools to easily navigate through the huge amount of information available in the Internet. One particular type of search technologies are the so- called shopbots, or comparison sites. The emergence of Internet shopbots and their implications for price...

This paper studies search and prices in the Medigap insurance market. Using data on market shares, insurer characteristics, and plan prices, we estimate to what extent prices can be explained by search and product differentiation. In our model, consumers search across Medigap insurers for prices...

This chapter provides a data-driven overview of the different online platforms that consumers use to search for books and booksellers, and documents how the use of these platforms is shifting over time. Our data suggest that, as a result of digitization, consumers are increasingly conducting...

We study the role of search cost heterogeneity in four models of consumer search. The models cover markets for homogeneous and differentiated goods where consumers search non-sequentially and sequentially. When search costs are sufficiently dispersed, an increase in search costs (in the sense of...

This paper provides a method to estimate search costs in an environment in which consumers are uncertain about the price distribution. Consumers learn about the price distribution by Bayesian updating their prior beliefs. The model provides bounds on the search costs that can rationalize...

The lion’s share of retail traffic through search engines originates from organic (natural) rather than sponsored (paid) links. We use a dataset constructed from over 12,000 search terms and 2 million users to identify drivers of the organic clicks that the top 759 retailers received from...

Organic product search results on Google and Bing do not systematically include information about seller characteristics (e.g., feedback ratings and prices). Consequently, it is often assumed that a retailer’s organic traffic is driven by the prominence of its position in the list of search...

This paper studies the estimation of the cost of non-sequential search. We provide a new method based on semi-nonparametric (SNP) estimation that allows us to pool price data from different consumer markets with the same underlying search cost distribution but dierent valuations or selling...

We generalize the model of Burdett and Judd (1983) to the case where an arbitrary finite number of firms sells a homogeneous good to buyers who have heterogeneous search costs. We show that a price dispersed symmetric Nash equilibrium always exists. Numerical results show that the behavior of...

This paper studies consumer search and pricing behaviour in the British domestic electricity market following its opening to competition in 1999. We develop a sequential search model in which an incumbent and an entrant group compete for consumers who find it costly to obtain information on...