Comparison Shopping: Learning Before Buying From Duopolists

Brian Albrecht and Mark Whitmeyer

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We explore a model of duopolistic competition in which consumers learn about the fit of each competitor's product. In equilibrium, consumers comparison shop: they learn only about the relative values of the products. When information is cheap, increasing the cost of information decreases consumer welfare; but when information is expensive, this relationship flips. As information frictions vanish, there is a limiting equilibrium that is ex post efficient.

Date: 2023-02, Revised 2023-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-gth, nep-ind and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.06580 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2302.06580

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().