consumers search for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger symmetricequilibrium, the probability that a firm is the next one to … when they do not find any product satisfactory enough, they continue searching atthe merging stores. When search costs are … sizable search economies. Such demand-side economies can conferthe merging firms a prominent position in the marketplace, in …

The search literature assumes that consumers know which firms sell products they are looking for, but are unaware of … the basic fact that they sell the product. In this way, advertising lowers the expected search cost. We show that this …

We model the idea that when consumers search for products, they first visit the firm whose advertising is more salient …. The gains a firm derives from being visited early increase in search costs, so equilibrium advertising increases as search … costs rise. This may result in lower firm profits when search costs increase. We extend the basic model by allowing for firm …

We present an oligopoly model where a certain fraction of consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover … prices. There are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity … equilibrium consumers' search intensity, and(ii) to the status quo number of firms.For instance, when consumers search with low …

demand with optimal consumer search. Consumers first choose which products to search; then, once they learn the utility they … characteristics but also from variation in the costs of searching them. We apply the model to the automobile industry. Our search cost … estimate is highly significant and indicates that consumers conduct a limited amount of search. Estimates of own- and cross …

We study a consumer non-sequential search oligopoly model with search cost heterogeneity. We first prove that an … search. We find that the sequence of points on the support of the search cost distribution that can be identified is …, the search cost distribution cannot be identified accurately at quantiles other than the lowest. To solve this pitfall, we …

. 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 …