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 …

search sequentially for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger symmetric equilibrium, consumers visit firmsrandomly. However … non-merging stores, and only when they do not find a satisfactory product there they visit the merging firms. As search … products of the constituent firms, which generates sizable search economies. We show that such demand-side economies can confer …

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 …