Recent theories suggest that consumers' search efforts are a function of prices and prices changes, respectively. This may help to explain the 'rockets and feathers' phenomenon often assigned to collusion – prices rise like rockets when costs increase and fall like feathers when costs...

Since Telser (1960), there is a well-established argument that a competitive market will not provide service due to free-riding. We show that with search frictions, the market may well provide service if the cost of doing so is not too large. Any market equilibrium with service provision has two...

A large number of financial assets are traded in both exchanges and over-the-counter markets (i.e., centralized and decentralized markets, CM and DM hereafter, respectively). Moreover, as documented by Biais and Green (2019), the 20th century has witnessed a secular migration of asset trade from...

We propose a model of price competition in which firms select prices conditional on privately-observed production costs and a subset of consumers can choose to search sequentially given price dispersion. In the model, we investigate how competition affects the consumers’ choice of whether to...

This article estimates a model of optimal search where consumers learn the distribution of gasoline prices during their driving trips. Our estimation incorporates traffic information and leverages the ordered search environment to recover parameters of the search and learning process using only...

In this article, we provide a novel measure of product differentiation by observing consumer search behavior directly. We track individual consumers in a price search engine and generate a measure of distance in product space, based on goods surveyed conjointly within individual search episodes....

We develop a probit choice model under optimal sequential search and apply it to the study of aggregate demand of consumer durable goods. In our joint model of search and choice, we derive a semi-closed form expression for the probability of choice that obeys the full set of restrictions imposed...

Hyper-media, owing to its ability to embed and link to information from other sources, has become an important modality for consuming news and information. Yet there remains a dearth of empirical research seeking to explain and forecast consumer behavior in this context. We develop a structural...

In many downtown areas, privately operated parking garages compete with each other and with publicly operated curbside parking. Garages exercise market power by charging fees that vary with parking duration. Curbside space is scarce, and drivers have to search for it. This creates a congestion...

We present a structural framework for the evaluation of public policies intended to increase job search intensity. Most of the literature defines search intensity as a scalar that influences the arrival rate of job offers; here we treat it as the number of job applications that workers send out....