Collusion with costly consumer search

I use standard consumer search models to study how an increase in market transparency (lower search costs or higher share of fully informed consumers) affects cartel stability. When firms sell horizontally differentiated products, cartels become more stable as the search cost increases; with homogen...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Petrikaité, Vaiva
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Recursos:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/133473
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/133473
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Collusion
Sequential search
Homogeneous products
Horizontal differentiation
Search costs
Cartel
Descrição
Resumo:I use standard consumer search models to study how an increase in market transparency (lower search costs or higher share of fully informed consumers) affects cartel stability. When firms sell horizontally differentiated products, cartels become more stable as the search cost increases; with homogeneous products, by contrast, the opposite holds. A higher share of fully informed consumers makes collusion less stable when the market is initially sufficiently transparent, whereas it happens otherwise if the market is originally little transparent.