between firms, thereby lowering prices and increasing economic welfare. This paper presents a search model that provides a … each of these equilibria. For example, a reduction in search cost may raise equilibrium prices when consumers' search … intensity is low, but reduce prices when consumers search intensity is high. These different comparative statics results may …

. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following … results. First, there is no monotone relationship between prices and the degree of advertising. Second, advertising and search … are “substitutes” for a large range of parameters. Third, when the cost of either search or advertising vanishes, the …

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 estimate search costs. We apply our method to a data set of online …

We study mergers in a market where <I>N</I> 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 changes in consumer search may strengthen, or alternatively, offset the …

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for … sequential and non-sequential search and using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data we … study the empirical validity of the models. Two equilibria arise: one with costless search and the other with costly search …