非表示:
キーワード:
strategic inattention, price discrimination, information transmission,
consumer choice, experiment
JEL:
D11 - Consumer Economics: Theory
JEL:
D42 - Monopoly
JEL:
D82 - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
JEL:
D83 - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
JEL:
L11 - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms
要旨:
Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get betterfitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable for the platform and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive better fits at potentially higher prices or restrict search behavior – be strategically inattentive – and receive a worse fit, but maybe a better deal. We study the strategic buyer-seller interaction in such a situation theoretically as well as experimentally. The search technology we use in the laboratory leads by construction to better-fitting products, but we indeed find that only sellers profit from the buyers’ use of the offered search tools.
