Online Shopping Intermediaries: The Strategic Design of Search Environments

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dukes, Anthony; Liu, Lin
• 署名单位: University of Southern California; State University System of Florida; University of Central Florida
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2176
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 1064-1077
• 关键词: Pricing; competitive strategy; Internet marketing; online shopping intermediaries

摘要

An online shopping intermediary is an Internet platform on which consumers and third-party sellers transact. Shopping intermediaries provide a search environment (e.g., search aids) to lower the search costs incurred by consumers when finding and evaluating sellers' products. We study strategic incentives of an intermediary in the design of its search environment as a means to ease search costs. An important aspect of our analysis is that consumers optimally decide how many sellers to evaluate and how deeply (e.g., number of attributes) to evaluate each of them. We find that the equilibrium search environment embeds sufficiently high search costs to prevent consumers from evaluating too many sellers, but not too high to cause them to evaluate sellers' products at partial depth.