Logo
Munich Personal RePEc Archive

Search Deterrence

Armstrong, Mark and Zhou, Jidong (2014): Search Deterrence.

[thumbnail of MPRA_paper_60891.pdf]
Preview
PDF
MPRA_paper_60891.pdf

Download (427kB) | Preview

Abstract

This paper studies sales techniques which discourage consumer search by making it harder or more expensive to return to buy after a search for alternatives. It is unilaterally profitable for a seller to deter search under mild conditions, but sellers can suffer when all do so. When a seller cannot commit to its policy, it exploits the inference that those consumers who try to buy later have no good alternative, and in many cases the outcome is as if the seller could only make an exploding offer. Search deterrence results in sub-optimal matching of products to consumers and often raises the price consumers pay.

Atom RSS 1.0 RSS 2.0

Contact us: mpra@ub.uni-muenchen.de

This repository has been built using EPrints software.

MPRA is a RePEc service hosted by Logo of the University Library LMU Munich.