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Consumer Search and Personal Search History

Student: Zavarzin Mikhail

Faculty: Faculty of Economic Sciences

Educational Programme: Joint HSE-NES Undergraduate Program in Economics (Bachelor)

Year of Graduation: 2016

It is often the case that competitors have information, customer information in particular, which could be useful for other participants, but which nobody would share unilaterally. If so, what would be the effect of using this information on firms and customers? To answer these questions, I develop a model in which firms can use information about consumers accumulating as a result of sequential consumer search. Consumers vary in preferences they have for the good. If sellers observe how many stores each customer has visited before, they can use it to price discriminate. For sufficiently small search costs, universal access interestingly benefits firms even more than unilateral access benefits a single firm with complete access; consumers are worse-off under both types of access. Also, I consider an alternative setup in which customers have identical valuations of the good but different search costs. In this case the results crucially depend on whether discrimination is anticipated. This indicates that the effect of customer information usage can depend on the nature of the information.

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