We propose the creation of “Trichet Bonds” as a comprehensive solution to the current sovereign debt crisis in the EU area. “Trichet Bonds,” to be named after the ECB president Jean-Claude Trichet, will be similar to “Brady Bonds” that resolved the Latin American debt crisis in the...

We study oligopolistic firms' incentives to share customer information about past purchase history in a situation where firms are uncertain about whether a particular consumer considers the product offerings complements or substitutes. By addressing this new type of behavior-based price...

I present a model to assess the impact of demand-side factors on the concentration of sales within large product assortments. Consumers face a search problem within an assortment of horizontally differentiated products supplied by a monopolist. They may search for a product match by drawing...

In a four-treatment experiment, we test some of the hypotheses in García-Gallego et al. (2004) concerning competition among a number of firms of which some (or all) are indexed by a price-comparison engine facilitating buyers’ search process. In this paper, we isolate individual behavior from...

This paper examines the effect of recommender systems on the diversity of sales. Two anecdotal views exist about such effects. Some believe recommenders help consumers discover new products and thus increase sales diversity. Others believe recommenders only reinforce the popularity of already...

This paper uses consumer search data to explain search frictions in online markets, within the context of an equilibrium search model. I use a novel dataset of consumer online browsing and purchasing behavior, which tracks all consumer search prior to each transaction. Using observed search...

Online price comparison agents (shopbots) allow consumers to instantaneously receive price and other information from many online retailers. Online consumer clickstream data from ComScore Inc.demonstrate that consumers are increasingly using shopbots to conduct search. This phenomenon raises...

The aim of this research is to analyze whether and when ratings are informative signals about the quality of movies. The ratings data of Netflix is used to fit a structural Bayesian learning model. This model links revealed experience utilities of raters, previous consumers, to the product...

This paper analyzes the impact on consumer prices of the size and biases of price comparison search engines. We develop several theoretical predictions, in the context of a model related to Burdett and Judd (1983) and Varian (1980), and test them experimentally. The data supports the model’s...

In this paper we estimate a structural model of search for differentiated products, using a unique dataset of individual search histories for hotels online. We propose and implement an identification strategy that allows to separately estimate consumer's beliefs, search costs and preferences....