When consumers search sequentially for prices and product matches, their beliefs of what they will encounter at the next rm are important in deciding whether or not to continue to search. In search environments where retailers have a common cost that is not known to consumers and is either the...

This paper studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. In our model, consumers observe the purchasing decision of a predecessor before deciding which rm to visit. We show that if consumers emulate their predecessor and initiate their search at the rm she purchased from, a...

This paper presents a generalised framework to understand mixed-strategy sales behaviour with informative advertising. By introducing competition in the utility space into a clearinghouse sales model, we oer a highly tractable framework that can i) provide a novel welfare analysis of...

Although (or because) it is uncommon to observe consumers bargaining at retail stores in the Western world, the circumstances under which retail rms are actually willing to bargain is largely unknown. We construct a theoretical model in order to better understand how price and rm characteristics...

We study vertical relations in markets with consumer and retailer search. Retailers search to learn manufacturers' prices. We obtain three important new results. First, we explain why empirical distributions of retail prices are bi- modal, with a regular price and a sales price. Second, under...

I show that the equilibrium derived in Gravelle and Sivey (2010) cannot hold for rational consumers. I then partially characterize the continuum of possible equilibria for rational consumers.

This paper presents a generalised framework to understand mixed-strategy sales behaviour with informative advertising. By introducing competition in the utility space into a clearinghouse sales model, we oer a highly tractable framework that can i) provide a novel welfare analysis of...

I show that the equilibrium derived in Gravelle and Sivey (2010) cannot hold for rational consumers. I then partially characterize the continuum of possible equilibria for rational consumers.

I show that marginal cost asymmetry has important implications for search models. In several widely used search models with mixed strategy equilibria, excluding some special cases, firms with different marginal costs cannot randomize prices in the same interval. So, even a small asymmetry in...