Prices, Product Differentiation, and Heterogeneous Search Costs

Jose Moraga-Gonzalez

No 335, 2015 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics

Abstract: We study price formation in the standard model of consumer search for differentiated products (Wolinsky, 1986) 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 affect the decision to search rather than to not search at all, which is an important but often neglected aspect of the price mechanism. Recognizing the role the equilibrium price plays in consumers' participation decisions turns out to be critical for understanding how search costs affect market power. This is because the two margins that determine prices---the intensive search margin, or search intensity, and the extensive search margin, or search participation---may be affected in opposing directions by a change in search costs. When search costs go up, fewer consumers decide to search, which modifies the search composition of demand such that demand can become more elastic. At the same time, the consumers who choose to search reduce their search intensity, which makes demand less elastic. Whether the effect on the extensive or the intensive search margin dominates depends on the range and shape of the search cost density. We identify conditions for higher search costs to result in higher, constant, or lower prices. Similar results are obtained when the marginal gains from search vary across consumers.

Date: 2015
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-ind
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2015/paper_335.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Prices, Product Differentiation, and Heterogeneous Search Costs (2014)
Working Paper: Prices, Product Differentiation, And Heterogeneous Search Costs (2014)
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:red:sed015:335

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in 2015 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Society for Economic Dynamics Marina Azzimonti Department of Economics Stonybrook University 10 Nicolls Road Stonybrook NY 11790 USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().