 Price Dispersion: an Evolutionary ApproachEd Hopkins and Robert M. Seymour ELSE working papers from ESRC Centre on Economics Learning and Social Evolution Abstract: In many markets it is possible to find rival sellers charging different prices for the same good. Earlier research has explained this phenomenon by demon-strating the existence of dispersed price equilibria when consumers must make use of costly search to discover prices. Taking as a starting point the model of Burdett and Judd (Econometric, 1983), this paper, extending evolutionary techniques to a game with nonlinear payoffs and a continuum of strategies, reexamines the question of price dispersion from an evolutionary, disequilibrium perspective. That is, firms and consumers adjust behaviour adaptively in response to current market conditions. We find that dispersed price equilibria are unstable when consumers use a fixed sample size search rule but may be stable when a reservation price rule is used. Keywords: Learning; Evolution; Search; Price Dispersion. (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:els:esrcls:043 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in ELSE working papers from ESRC Centre on Economics Learning and Social Evolution Contact information at EDIRC. |
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