Digital platforms use recommendations to facilitate the exchange between platform actors, such as trade between buyers and sellers. Platform actors expect, and legislators increasingly require that competition, including recommendations, are fair—especially for a market-dominating platform on...

This paper examines the effect of price matching guarantees (PMGs) in a sequential search model. PMGs are simultaneously chosen with prices and some consumers (shoppers) know the firms' decisions before buying, while others (non-shoppers) enter a shop first before observing a firm's price and...

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for sequential and non-sequential search and, using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data, we study the empirical validity of the models. Two...

This paper is the first to examine the effect of minimum price guarantees

A large variety of markets, such as retail markets for gasoline or mortgage markets, are characterized by a small number of firms offering a fairly homogenous product at virtually the same cost, while consumers, being uninformed about this cost, sequentially search for low prices. The present...

We examine a Bertrand competition game between two intermediaries offering matching services between two sides of a market. Indirect network externalities arise as the probability of finding one's match with a given intermediary increase with the number of agents of the other side who use the...

We study mergers in a market where <I>N</I> firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices. The main motivation for such an analysis is that mergers generally affect market prices and thereby, in a search environment, the search behavior of consumers. Endogenous...</i>

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, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in...

We modify the paper of Stahl (1989) [Stahl, D.O., 1989. Oligopolistic pricing with sequential consumer search. American Economic Review 79, 700–12] by relaxing the assumption that consumers obtain the first price quotation for free. When all price quotations are costly to obtain, the unique...

We study the impact of the Euro on prices charged by online retailers within the EU. Our data spans the period before and after the Euro was introduced, covers a variety of products, and includes countries inside and outside of the Eurozone. After controlling for cost, demand, and market...