Consumer search and optimal information

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dogan, Mustafa; Hu, Ju
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Peking University
• 刊物名称: RAND JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0741-6261
• DOI: 10.1111/1756-2171.12411
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 386-403
• 关键词: simple economics; disclosure; DESIGN

摘要

This article studies an information design problem in a sequential consumer search environment. Consumers, whose valuation of firms' products is uncertain, observe a noisy signal about the valuation upon being matched with a firm. The goal is to characterize those signal structures that maximize consumer surplus. We show that the consumer-optimal signal structure can be found within the class of conditional unit-elastic demand signal distributions. A rich set of properties and comparative statics of the consumer-optimal signal distributions are also derived.