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 … beliefs (and can be as high as the joint prot maximizing prices), and are non-monotonic in the search cost. Moreover, price …

This paper studies observational learning in a consumer search environment. In our model, consumers observe the … initiate their search at the rm she purchased from, a social multiplier of demand induces a lower equilibrium price. Further …, as the search cost increases, rms compete ercely to attract consumers and prices converge to the marginal cost. We show …

This is the first paper on consumer search where the cost of going back to stores already searched is explicitly taken … into account. We show that the optimal sequential search rule under costly second visits is very different from the … implications of costly second visits on market equilibrium in two celebrated search models. In the Wolinsky model some consumers …