We analyse consumers' search and purchase decisions on an Internet platform. Using a rich dataset on all adverts posted and transactions made on a major French Internet platform (PriceMinister), we show evidence of substantial price dispersion among adverts for the same product. We also show...

I analyse a homogeneous goods framework where firms receive binary and noisy signals about consumer valuations and consumers engage in sequential search. Firms have no information about consumers' search histories in the baseline model. Different search costs give rise to structurally different...

Competition and consumer search costs can lead to price dispersion in an oligopoly. IO research has long identified the existence of search costs and estimated their distribution and is now beginning to study which consumers sit where in the distribution. This paper argues for a view of consumer...

We provide a framework for empirical analysis of negotiated-price markets. Using mortgage market data and a search and negotiation model, we characterize the welfare impact of search frictions and quantify the role of search costs and brand loyalty for market power. Search frictions reduce...

This paper proposes a framework for studying how consumer search frictions affect retail market structure. In our model single-product firms which supply different products can merge to form a multiproduct firm. Consumers wish to buy multiple products and value the one-stop shopping convenience...

We investigate the overall impact of stock-out on individual consumers' information search behavior through both search-theoretic and experimental approaches. As the probability of stock-out increases, search intensity decreases, while the expected number of searches may increase. Such increases...

In a recent paper Hong and Shum (forthcoming) present a structural methodology to estimate search cost distributions. We extend their approach to the case of oligopoly and present a maximum likelihood estimate of the search cost distribution. We apply our method to a data set of online prices...