The internet has not only reduced consumer search costs, but has also enabled more efficient and sophisticated search procedures. For example, online consumers can streamline their search process if appropriately defined categories of products and services are available. This paper proposes a...

A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers. We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives. These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

This paper studies sales techniques which discourage consumer search by making it harder or more expensive to return to buy after a search for alternatives. It is unilaterally profitable for a seller to deter search under mild conditions, but sellers can suffer when all do so. When a seller...

This paper proposes a model in which identical sellers of a homogenous product compete in both prices and price frames (i.e., ways to present price information). We model price framing by assuming that firms’ frame choices affect the comparability of their price offers: consumers may fail to...

This paper presents an ordered search model in which consumers search both for price and product fitness. We show that there is price dispersion in equilibrium and prices rise in the order of search. The top firms in consumer search order, though charge lower prices, earn higher profits due to...

This paper studies the implications of consumer reference dependence in market competition. If consumers take some product (e.g., the first product they have considered) as the reference point in evaluating others and exhibit loss aversion, then the more "prominent" firm whose product is taken...

We discuss the impact of consumer protection policies on consumer incentives to become informed of the best deals available in the market. In a market with costly consumer search, we find that imposing a cap on suppliers' prices reduces the incentive to engage in search, with the result that...

We consider a market in which firms can partially observe each consumer's search behavior in the market. In our main model, a firm knows whether a consumer is visiting it for the first time or whether she is returning after a previous visit. Firms have an incentive to offer a lower price on a...

This paper presents a sequential search model where consumers look for several products among competitive multiproduct �rms. In a multiproduct search mar- ket, both consumer behavior and �rm behavior exhibit di¤erent features from the single-product case: a consumer often returns to...

A common sales tactic is for a seller to encourage a potential customer to make her purchase decision quickly. We consider a market with sequential consumer search in which firms often encourage first-time visitors to buy immediately, either by making an "exploding offer" (which permits no...