Search, Information, and Prices

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bergemann, Dirk; Brooks, Benjamin; Morris, Stephen
• 署名单位: Yale University; University of Chicago; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF POLITICAL ECONOMY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-3808
• DOI: 10.1086/714443
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 2275-2319
• 关键词: model; distributions

摘要

Consider a market with identical firms offering a homogeneous good. For any given ex ante distribution of the price count (the number of firms from which a consumer obtains a quote), we derive a tight upper bound on the equilibrium distribution of sales prices. The bound holds across all models of firms' common-prior higher-order beliefs about the price count, including the extreme cases of full information and no information. One implication of our results is that a small ex ante probability that the price count is equal to one can lead to a large increase in the expected price. The bound also applies in a large class of models where the price count distribution is endogenously determined.