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,...

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...

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...