scispace - formally typeset
Journal ArticleDOI

Ordered Consumer Search

Mark Armstrong
- 01 Oct 2017 - 
- Vol. 15, Iss: 5, pp 989-1024
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
In this article, the authors discuss situations in which consumers search through their options in a deliberate order, in contrast to more familiar models with random search, and show how ordered search can be reformulated as a simpler discrete choice problem without search frictions.
Abstract
The paper discusses situations in which consumers search through their options in a deliberate order, in contrast to more familiar models with random search. Topics include: network effects (consumers may be better off following the same search order as other consumers); the use of price and non-price advertising to direct search; the impact of consumers starting a new search with their previous supplier; the incentive sellers have to merge or co-locate with other sellers; and the incentive a seller can have to raise its own search cost. I also show how ordered search can be reformulated as a simpler discrete choice problem without search frictions.

read more

Citations
More filters
Posted Content

Intermediaries and Consumer Search

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose an analytical framework that encompasses several models of search for differentiated products, with a high-quality firm being more likely to offer a product that meets each consumer's need.
Posted Content

Incentives for Information Provision: Energy Efficiency in the Spanish Rental Market

TL;DR: In this article, the authors build a search model with asymmetric information regarding houses' energy efficiency and show that such a penalty is higher the greater the disclosure rate of ECs. And they empirically quantified their theoretical predictions in the context of the Spanish rental market.
Journal ArticleDOI

Incentives for information provision: Energy efficiency in the Spanish rental market

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors build a search model with asymmetric information regarding houses' energy efficiency to shed light on the house owners' incentives to disclose energy certificates (ECs) in the rental market and show that such a penalty is higher the greater the disclosure rate of ECs in the local market.
Journal ArticleDOI

A search model of costly product returns

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyzed a market in which consumers buy horizontally differentiated products without knowing their exact valuations and their shopping strategy is similar to the search strategy of a consumer in a sequential costly search model.
Journal ArticleDOI

Prominence, Complexity, and Pricing

TL;DR: The authors analyzes prominence in a homogeneous product market where two firms simultaneously choose both prices and price complexity levels, and finds that higher prominence may benefit consumers and, conditional on choosing lowest complexity, the prominent firm's average price is lower.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

A Simple Model of Herd Behavior

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze a sequential decision model in which each decision maker looks at the decisions made by previous decision makers in taking her own decision, and they show that the decision rules that are chosen by optimizing individuals will be characterized by herd behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI

Information and Consumer Behavior

TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that consumers lack full information about the prices of goods, but their information is probably poorer about the quality variation of products simply because the latter information is more difficult to obtain.
Posted Content

A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades

TL;DR: It is argued that localized conformity of behavior and the fragility of mass behaviors can be explained by informational cascades.
Posted Content

A Model of Sales.

Related Papers (5)