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Improved Information In Search Markets, Jidong Zhou
Improved Information In Search Markets, Jidong Zhou
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
How will an improved information environment affects competition and market performance when consumers face search frictions? This paper provides a unified way to model information improvement that makes the search pool more ``selective" (e.g., due to personalized recommendations), or more ``informative" (e.g., due to the availability of more detailed product information). Information improvement tends to induce consumers to search less, intensify price competition and benefit consumers, if the search friction is small, or if information improvement truncates the match utility distribution from below. More generally, however, it is also possible for information improvement to raise the market price and harm …
Improved Information In Search Markets, Jidong Zhou
Improved Information In Search Markets, Jidong Zhou
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper studies how an improved information environment affects consumer search and firm competition. We find conditions for information improvement to have unambiguous impacts on search duration, price and consumer welfare. In many cases consumers benefit from information improvement regardless of how it affects the market price, but there are also cases where information improvement raises price significantly so that consumers suffer from it. Our model provides a unified way to consider the market implications of various types of information improvement such as search advertising, personalized recommendations, filtering, and VR shopping technology.