We investigate the impact of consumer search and competition on pricing strategies in Germany’s electricity retail. We utilize a unique panel dataset on spatially varying search requests at major online price comparison websites to construct a direct measure of search intensity and combine...

This paper extends Pissarides (1990)’s matching model by considering two sectors (routine and manual) and workers’ occupational choices, in the context of skill-biased demand shifts, to the detriment of routine jobs and in favour of manual jobs because of technological changes. The...

In many markets consumers have imperfect information about the utility they derive from the products that are on offer and need to visit stores to find the product that is the most preferred. This paper develops a discrete-choice model of demand with optimal consumer search. Consumers first...

An advantage of collective wage agreement is that search and business-stealing externalities can be internalized. A disadvantage is that it takes more time before an optimal allocation is reached because more productive firms (for a particular worker type) can no longer signal this by posting...

We investigate an equilibrium search model in which the search frictions are increasing with the distance to the central business district allowing for on-the-job search and endogenous (monopsony) wage formation and land allocation. We find that there are many different possible outcomes with...

We study price formation in the standard model of consumer search for differentiated products but allow for search cost heterogeneity. In doing so, we dispense with the usual assumption that all consumers search at least once in equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the manner in which prices...

We study active labor market policies (ALMP) in a matching model. ALMPs are modelled as a subsidy to job search. Workers differ in their productivity, and search takes place along an extensive margin. An additional job seeker affects the quality of unemployed workers. As a result, the Hosios...

This paper reports a new approach to disambiguation of large patent databases. Available international patent databases do not identify unique innovators. Record disambiguation poses a significant barrier to subsequent research. Present methods for overcoming this barrier couple ad-hoc rules for...

Search models are used in a variety of fields. One of those is consumer search and in it the Stahl model is one of the most popular search models. The literature in search models concentrates mainly on equilibria with a consumer reserve price. This is a simplifying condition, which narrows down...

This paper investigates the effects of a low bound price. To do so, a popular and empirically proven model (Stahl (89') [11]) is used. The model is extended to include an exogenously given bound on prices sellers can offer, excluding prices below such bound. The finding are rather surprising -...

We show that the equivalence between certain problems of singular stochastic control (SSC) and related questions of optimal stopping known for convex performance criteria (see, for example, Karatzas and Shreve (1984)) continues to hold in a non convex problem provided a related discretionary...

We study price formation in the standard model of consumer search for differentiated products but allow for search cost heterogeneity. In doing so, we dispense with the usual assumption that all consumers search at least once in equilibrium. This allows us to analyze the manner in which prices...