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...

Search models are used in a variety of fields. One of those is consumer search and in it the Stahl model is one of the most popular search models. The literature in search models concentrates mainly on equilibria with a consumer reserve price. This is a simplifying condition, which narrows down...

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

We implement a simple two-shop search model in the laboratory with the aim of testing if consumers behave differently in equivalent situations, where prices are displayed either as net prices or as gross prices with discounts. We compare search behavior in base treatments (where both shops post...

We consider an oligopoly model in which consumers engage in sequential search based on partial product information and advertised prices. We derive a simple condition that fully summarizes consumers' shopping outcomes and use the condition to reformulate the pricing game among the sellers as a...

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...

In a four-treatment experiment, we test some of the hypotheses in Garcia-Gallego et al.(2004) concerning competition among a number of firms of which some (or all) are indexed by a price-comparison engine facilitating buyers' search process. In this paper, we isolate individual behavior from...

We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. The model is similar to that of Robert and Stahl (1993) with two major (and some...