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, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in...

In many markets consumers have imperfect information about the utility they derive from the products that are on offer and need to visit stores to find the product that is the most preferred. This paper develops a discrete-choice model of demand with optimal consumer search. Consumers first...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <I>British Journal of Industrial Relations</I>, 49(2), 331-361. 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2009.00760.x<P> This paper tests the pro-competitive effect of trade in the product and labour markets of UK manufacturing sectors between 1988 and 2003 using a...</p></i>

Network shares and retail prices are not symmetric in the telecommunications market with multiple bottlenecks which give rise to new questions of access fee regulation. In this paper we consider a model with two types of asymmetry arising from different entry timing, i.e. a larger reputation for...

In the presence of agglomeration economies one might expect a relocation and concentration of industries. Then firm start-up activities may be assumed to reveal those effects. We introduce an empirical testable model inspired by the New Economic Geography and human capital externalities...

We modify the paper of Stahl (1989) [Stahl, D.O., 1989. Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search. American Economic Review 79, 700–12] by relaxing the assumption that consumers obtain the first price quotation for free. When all price quotations are costly to obtain, the unique...

This paper investigates optimal airport pricing when airlines provide imperfect substitutes products, and make decisions on capacity, scheduling and pricing. We show that the first-best toll per flight may be higher than the simple market-shares formulae that were recently derived for Cournot...

We consider the efficiency of Cournot and Bertrand equilibria in a duopoly with substitutable goods where firms invest in process R&D. Under Cournot competition firms always invest more in R&D than under Bertrand competition. More importantly, Cournot competition yields lower prices than...

We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following results. First, there is no monotone relationship...