The Impact of Consumer Search on Quality Disclosure in Markets

Student: Ishmaeva Guzel

Supervisor: Levent Celik

Educational Programme: Economics: Research Programme (Master)

Year of Graduation: 2019

With an emergence of internet technologies, premises of classical models on consumer search seem no longer relevant. Now, via the internet, every consumer is able to, first, order a desired product without visiting a shop and, second, obtain a big picture regarding the market prices without leaving a home. However, obtainment of information about the quality of a desired good still requires some effort. Current work addresses stated issues by embedding consumer search mechanism into the quality disclosure framework, also letting consumers to buy the product without putting any search effort. Surprisingly, resulting theoretical model predicts that in some cases consumers’ welfare is higher without an ability to search for additional quality information.

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