Related papers: Consumer Search with Chain Stores

The existing studies on consumer search agree that consumers are worse-off when they do not observe sellers' production marginal cost than when they do. In this paper we challenge this conclusion. Employing a canonical model of simultaneous…

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…

We analyze competition on nonlinear prices in homogeneous goods markets with consumer search. In equilibrium firms offer two-part tariffs consisting of a linear price and lump-sum fee. The equilibrium production is socially efficient as the…

A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…

This paper explains four things in a unified way. First, how e-commerce can generate price equilibria where physical shops either compete with virtual shops for consumers with Internet access, or alternatively, sell only to consumers with…

Much like small ripples in a stream, which get lost in the larger waves, small changes in retail prices often fly under the radar of public perceptions, while large price changes appear as marketing moves associated with demand and…

The present work generalizes the analytical results of Petrikaite (2016) to a market where more than two firms interact. As a consequence, for a generic number of firms in the oligopoly model described by Janssen et al (2005), the…

This paper extends the sequential search model of Wolinsky (1986) by allowing firms to choose how much match value information to disclose to visiting consumers. This restores the Diamond paradox (Diamond 1971): there exist no symmetric…

We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…

Matching markets are of particular interest in computer science and economics literature as they are often used to model real-world phenomena where we aim to equitably distribute a limited amount of resources to multiple agents and…

We present a simple one-parameter model for spatially localised evolving agents competing for spatially localised resources. The model considers selling agents able to evolve their pricing strategy in competition for a fixed market. Despite…

We study scenarios where multiple sellers of a homogeneous good compete on prices, where each seller can only sell to some subset of the buyers. Crucially, sellers cannot price-discriminate between buyers. We model the structure of the…

We study the price competition in a duopoly with an arbitrary number of buyers. Each seller can offer multiple units of a commodity depending on the availability of the commodity which is random and may be different for different sellers.…

We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…

This paper examines competitive information disclosure in search markets with a mix of savvy consumers, who search costlessly, and inexperienced consumers, who face positive search costs. Savvy consumers incentivize truthful disclosure;…

This paper investigates the effects of a low bound price. To do so, a popular and empirically proven model (Stahl (89') \cite{Stahl89}) is used. The model is extended to include an exogenously given bound on prices sellers can offer,…

Platforms design the form of presentation by which sellers are shown to the buyers. This design not only shapes the buyers' experience but also leads to different market equilibria or dynamics. One component in this design is through the…

The optimal price of each firm falls in the search cost of consumers, in the limit to the monopoly price, despite the exit of lower-value consumers in response to costlier search. Exit means that fewer inframarginal consumers remain. The…

We look at price formation in a retail setting, that is, companies set prices, and consumers either accept prices or go someplace else. In contrast to most other models in this context, we use a two-dimensional spatial structure for…

We consider a network of sellers, each selling a single product, where the graph structure represents pair-wise complementarities between products. We study how the network structure affects revenue and social welfare of equilibria of the…