I study a model of oligopolistic competition in which consumers search for prices, but have no idea about the underlying price distribution. Consumers’ behaviour satisfies four consistency requirements such that beliefs about the underlying distribution maximize Shannon entropy. I derive the...

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...

In this paper we analyse a model of oligopolistic competition in which consumers search without priors. Consumers do not have prior beliefs about the distribution of prices charged by rms and thus try to use a robust search procedure: they minimise the loss relative to the searcher, who knows...

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...

While search experiments are available in several designs, accumulating ex- perimental evidence suggests that individual search behavior depends on design details. This paper reports the first classification and comparison of several search experiment designs widely accepted in search studies....

Empirical search cost estimates tend to increase in the size of the transaction, even if search can be done conveniently online. To assess this pattern systematically, we conduct an online search experiment in which we manipulate the price scale while keeping the physical search effort for each...

Do the choices of consumers who search for a product's best price exhibit risk neutral, risk averse or loss averse risk attitudes? We study how in a problem of sequential search with costless recall the relation between a consumer's willingness to pay for continued search and the level of price...

Do the choices of consumers who search for a product's best price exhibit risk neutral, risk averse or loss averse risk attitudes? We study how in a problem of sequential search with costless recall the relation between a consumer's willingness to pay for continued search and the level of price...

While search experiments are available in several designs, accumulating ex- perimental evidence suggests that individual search behavior depends on design details. This paper reports the first classification and comparison of several search experiment designs widely accepted in search studies....

We study the estimation of preference heterogeneity in markets where consumers engage in costly search to learn product characteristics. Costly search amplifies the way consumer preferences translate into purchase probabilities, generating a seemingly large degree of preference heterogeneity. We...