We describe firm pricing when consumers search passively and follow simple reservation price rules. In stark contrast to other models in the literature, this approach yields equilibrium price dispersion in pure strategies even when firms have the same marginal costs. In equilibrium, lower price...

Sales tax is generally not included in the advertised price quoted to consumers in the United States. In contrast, value added taxes (VAT) are embedded into the price in most other countries. This article investigates how the two different pricing structures and consumers' decision-making...

We analyze a market where firms compete in a conventional and an electronicretail channel. Consumers easily compare prices online, but some incur purchaseuncertainties on the online channel. We investigate the market shares of the two retailchannels and the prices that are charged. We find that...

We broaden and develop the classic captive-and-shopper model of sales. Firstly, we allow for asymmetric marginal costs as well as asymmetric captive audiences. These asymmetries jointly determine the identities of the two or more firms we find compete (via randomized sales) to serve shoppers. In...

This paper studies the consequence of an imprecise recall of the price by the consumers in the Bertrand price competition model for a homogeneous good. It is shown that firms can exploit this weakness and charge prices above the competitive price. This markup increases for rougher recall of the...

In a four-treatment experiment, we test some of the hypotheses in Garcia-Gallego et al.(2004) concerning competition among a number of firms of which some (or all) are indexed by a price-comparison engine facilitating buyers' search process. In this paper, we isolate individual behavior from...

We consider product markets in which consumers are interested only in a specific product category and initially do not know which product category matches their tastes. Using sophisticated tracking technologies, an intermediary can make inferences about a consumer's preferred product category...

A common feature of low-price guarantees is that they allow consumers to postpone bargain-hunting until after the purchase. This paper addresses a number of questions concerning the adoption pattern of price-matching and price-beating guarantees with post-purchase search and their impacts on...

A notable feature of most markets is that firms are multiproduct, in the sense that they offer for sale more than one single type of good. In this paper, I discuss a recent paper, Kaplan et al. (2016), that explores both empirically and theoretically price dispersion in a multiproduct setting. I...

We study how consumer search affects pricing in markets with incumbents and entrants using panel data on German electricity retail markets. Consumers observe the baseline price of the incumbent and decide whether or not to search. Incumbent providers can price discriminate between searching and...