Oligopolistic Pricing with Online Search
Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 111-141, 2011
41 Pages Posted: 11 Apr 2010 Last revised: 23 Jun 2011
Date Written: May 5, 2009
Abstract
We set up a game-theoretic model to examine the oligopolistic price competition, considering two features of online search: the existence of a common search ordering and shoppers who have non-positive search cost. We find that in equilibrium firms set their prices probabilistically rather than deterministically, and different firms follow different price distributions. The equilibrium pricing pattern exhibits an interesting local-competition feature, in which direct price competition occurs only between firms adjacent to each other. Further, we incorporate consumers' search strategies into the model so that both search order and stopping rules are determined rationally by consumers. We show that similar patterns may continue to hold in the fully rational framework when consumers have higher inspection costs for inferior positions.
Keywords: Pricing, Search, Oligopolistic Competition, Price Dispersion, Local Competition
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Recommended Papers
-
Position Auctions with Consumer Search
By Susan Athey and Glenn Ellison
-
Paid Placement: Advertising and Search on the Internet
By Yongmin Chen and Chuan He
-
An Empirical Analysis of Search Engine Advertising: Sponsored Search in Electronic Markets
By Anindya Ghose and Sha Yang
-
By Sha Yang and Anindya Ghose
-
From Generic to Branded: A Model of Spillover Dynamics in Paid Search Advertising
-
By Juan Feng, Hemant K. Bhargava, ...
-
Search Engine Advertising: Channel Substitution when Pricing Ads to Context
By Avi Goldfarb and Catherine E. Tucker
-
A Dynamic Model of Sponsored Search Advertising
By Song Yao and Carl F. Mela