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 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 …

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 …