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 examines the implications of "prominence" in search markets.  We model prominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers.  If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominent firm will charge a lower price than...

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...

This paper examines the implications of “prominence” in search markets. We modelprominence by supposing that the prominent firm will be sampled first by all consumers.If there are no systematic quality differences among firms, we find that the prominentfirm will charge a lower price than its...