The impact of imperfect information on the price setting behaviour of firms is analysed. Specifically, consumers support an information cost to become informed about prices. Firms are endowed with U-shaped average cost curves. If a firm does not supply more than its competitive supply as...

In this paper we extend a job search-matching model with firm-specific investments in training developed by Mortensen (2000) to allow for different offer arrival rates in employment and unemployment. The model by Mortensen changes the original wage posting model (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) in...

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for sequential and non-sequential search and, using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data, we study the empirical validity of the models. Two...

This paper considers a marriage market with two-sided search and transferable utility in which the match payoff depends on age. It characterizes a set of payoff functions consistent with two salient marriage age patterns, (1) assortative matching by age, and (2) “differential age matching,”...

In this paper we theoretically and empirically analyze equilibrium search models of the labor market. The Burdett-Mortensen equilibrium search model is generalized by allowing for continuous distributions of firm productivity types within a given labor market. We characterize equilibrium and...

The wage posting approach to search equilibrium is incorporated into the equilibrium unemployment approach in the paper. The unique equilibrium to the wage posting game analyzed is a distribution of wage offers of the same functional form as that originally derived by Burdett and Mortensen...

This note constructs an efficient mechanism for finding the best candidate for a committee from a sequence of potential candidates. Committee members have independent private values information about the quality of the candidate. The mechanism selects the best candidate according to the standard...

In this paper we study the impact of search engine optimization (SEO) on the competition between advertisers for organic and sponsored search results. We find that a positive level of search engine optimization may improve the search engine’s ranking quality and thus the satisfaction of its...

Search engines enable advertisers to target consumers based on the query they have entered. In a framework in which consumers search sequentially after having entered a query, I show that targeting reduces search costs, improves matches and intensifies price competition. However, a...

This paper studies the identification of the costs of simultaneous search in a class of (portfolio) problems studied by Chade and Smith (2006). We show that aggregate data from a single market, or disaggregate data from a single market segment, do not provide sufficient information to identify...