The effects of entry on consumer and total welfare are studied in a model of consumer search. Potential entrants differ in quality, with a higher-quality seller being more likely to offer consumers a high-value product. Contrary to the standard view in economics that more entry benefits consumers, we find that consumer welfare has an inverted-U relationship with entry cost, and free entry is ex...

Through their communications mix, firms make decisions that have implications for the ease with which consumers can search for product information. A common intuition is that firms would like to make information easily available to consumers, but choose not to because facilitating consumer search is costly to them. The main result of this paper counters this intuition – firms may not want to ma...

P returns cost U.S. companies more than $100 billion annually. The cost and scale of returns management issues necessitate a deeper understanding of how to deal with product returns. We develop an analytical model that describes how consumer purchase and return decisions are affected by a seller’s pricing and restocking fee policy. Taking into account the consumers’ strategic behavior, we deriv...

it is very important to analyze the rice market structure in mazandaran province, as this province is competent to produce rice. mazandaran rice market was analyzed by completing 55 questionnaires in producer, wholesaler and retailers level, randomly in 2009. results show that marketing margins of two varieties namely- local (tarom) and multi-product- were 5850 and 3700 rials, respectively; als...

We introduce the concept of “marketing avoidance” – consumer efforts to conceal themselves and to deflect marketing. The setting is one where sellers market some item through solicitations to potential consumers, who differ in their benefit from the item and suffer harm from receiving solicitations. Concealment by one consumer induces sellers to shift solicitations to other consumers, while def...

This paper analyzes search frictions in online markets using data depicting the web browsing and purchasing behavior of a large panel of consumers. In this data, consumer search behavior is observed prior to a transaction. I use data on consumers shopping for books online to link prices and consumer search patterns at different bookstores, estimating consumer search costs in the context of a fi...