We investigate the relationship between external quality evaluation via experts, firm reputation and product prices and extend the existing empirical literature in three dimensions. First, we empirically account for endogenous reputation effects. An increase in quality has an immediate positive...

We investigate how consumer information affects price adjustment in the Austrian retail gasoline market. Our measure of consumer information is obtained from detailed census data on commuting behavior, as commuters can freely sample prices on their commuting route and are thus better informed...

Whereas a large number of empirical studies have been devoted to analysing consumer demand for specific products, much less attention has been paid to the household's demand for product variety (the number of different products consumed in a specific time period). This paper analyses consumer...

In this article, we provide a novel measure of product differentiation by observing consumer search behavior directly. We track individual consumers in a price search engine and generate a measure of distance in product space, based on goods surveyed conjointly within individual search episodes....