In many markets buyers are poorly informed about which firms sell the product (product availability) and prices, and therefore have to spend time to obtain this information. In contrast, sellers typically have a better idea about which rivals offer the product. Information asymmetry between...

In markets with search frictions, consumers can acquire information about goods either through costly search or from friends via word-of-mouth (WOM) communication. How do sellers’ market power react to a very large increase in the number of consumers’ friends with whom they engage in WOM?...

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

This paper develops a dynamic model of consumer search that, despite placing very little structure on the dynamic problem faced by consumers, allows us to exploit intertemporal variation in price distributions to estimate the distribution from which consumer search costs are initially drawn. We...

This paper develops a dynamic model of consumer search that, despite placing very little structure on the dynamic problem faced by consumers, allows us to exploit intertemporal variation in within-period price and search cost distributions to estimate the population distribution from which...

This paper surveys models of markets in which some consumers are "savvy" while others are not.  We discuss when the presence of savvy consumers improves the deals available to non-savvy consumers in the market (the case of search externalities), and when the non-savvy fund generous deals for...

We study the interplay between quality provision and consumer search in a search market where firms may design products of inferior quality to promote them to naive consumers who fail to fully understand product characteristics. We derive an equilibrium in which both superior and inferior...

We study the implications of biased consumer beliefs for search market outcomes in the seminal framework due to Diamond (1971). Biased consumers base their search strategy on a belief function which specifies for any (true) distribution of utility offers in the market a possibly incorrect...

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...

We consider a market with sequential consumer search in which firms can distinguish potential customers visiting for the first time from returning visitors. We show that firms often have an incentive to make it costly for its visitors to return after investigating rivals, either by making an...