Strategic inattention in product search

Arbeitspapier

Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get betterfitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable for the platform and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive better fits at potentially higher prices or restrict search behavior - be strategically inattentive - and receive a worse fit, but maybe a better deal. We study the strategic buyer-seller interaction in such a situation theoretically as well as experimentally. The search technology we use in the laboratory leads by construction to better-fitting products, but we indeed find that only sellers profit from the buyers' use of the offered search tools.

Angaben zum Objekt

• Sprache: Englisch

Verweise und Beziehungen

• Erschienen in: Series: Preprints of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods ; No. 2017/21

Klassifikation und Themen

• Klassifikation: Wirtschaft ; Consumer Economics: Theory ; Market Structure, Pricing, and Design: Monopoly ; Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design ; Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness ; Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
• Thema: strategic inattention ; price discrimination ; information transmission ; consumer choice ; experiment

Beteiligte, Orts- und Zeitangaben

• Ereignis: Geistige Schöpfung
• (wer): Hillenbrand, Adrian ; Hippel, Svenja
• Ereignis: Veröffentlichung
• (wer): Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
• (wo): Bonn
• (wann): 2017

Weitere Informationen

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/174500
• Letzte Aktualisierung: 10.03.2025, 11:42 MEZ