Researchers are increasingly able to observe consumers' behavior prior to a purchase, such as their navigation through a store or website and the products they consider. Such pre-purchase (or search) data can be valuable to researchers in a variety of ways: as an additional source of information...

We provide a detailed overview of the empirical implementation of the sequential search model proposed by Weitzman (1979). We discuss the assumptions underlying the model, the identification of search cost and preference parameters, the necessary normalizations of utility parameters,...

Researchers are increasingly able to observe consumers’ behavior prior to a purchase, such as their navigation through a store or website and the products they consider. Such pre-purchase (or search) data can be valuable to researchers in a variety of ways: as an additional source of...

We provide a detailed overview of the empirical implementation of the sequential search model proposed by Weitzman (1979). We discuss the assumptions underlying the model, the identifica-tion of search cost and preference parameters, the necessary normalizations of utility parameters,...

We provide a detailed overview of the empirical implementation of the sequential search model proposed by Weitzman (1979). We discuss the assumptions underlying the model, the identifica-tion of search cost and preference parameters, the necessary normalizations of utility parameters,...

In the canonical sequential search model, consumers inspect options consecutively until they decide to stop searching, a decision which occurs only once before consumers determine whether and what to purchase. However, using data on consumers’ online browsing histories, we document that...

When shopping online, consumers can reach a product detail page via multiple routes: by going through a category page (e.g., women's shoes), by directly typing the product name in the search field (e.g., Nike Women's Air Max), by going through a sales page (e.g., the shoes sale page), etc....

Standard search models assume that consumers actively decide on the order, identity, and number of products they search. We document that online, a large fraction of searches happen in a more passive manner, with consumers merely reacting to online advertisements that do not allow them to choose...

This paper develops a search model in which both the information obtained during the search process and the information possessed by consumers prior to search influence their choices. We estimate our model on a data set from an experiment that has two novel features: (i) it contains information...