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 …

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 …

The search literature assumes that consumers know which firms sell products they are looking for, but are unaware of … the basic fact that they sell the product. In this way, advertising lowers the expected search cost. We show that this …

. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following … results. First, there is no monotone relationship between prices and the degree of advertising. Second, advertising and search … are “substitutes” for a large range of parameters. Third, when the cost of either search or advertising vanishes, the …

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 …

consumers search for satisfactory deals. In the pre-merger symmetricequilibrium, the probability that a firm is the next one to … when they do not find any product satisfactory enough, they continue searching atthe merging stores. When search costs are … sizable search economies. Such demand-side economies can conferthe merging firms a prominent position in the marketplace, in …

This study constructs a sequential consumer search model with differentiated products in which some consumers search … for a single product while the others search for multiple products. When the mass of consumers who demand one of the … products decreases, the price for one product decreases while another price increases due to the joint-search effect, even if …

I analyze a model of directed search in which a consumer inspects a finite number of products sharing attributes with … each others. The consumer discovers her valuation for the attributes of the inspected products and adapts her search …; this generates a search rule that accounts for learning systematically. In this search environment, a multiproduct seller …

The consumer search literature mostly considers independently distributed products. In contrast, I study a model of … directed search with infinitely many products whose valuations are correlated through shared attributes. I propose a tractable … optimal search process along different paths. This scoring system generates an optimal search policy conceptually equivalent …