Search, Design, and Market Structure

Search, Design, and Market Structure

The Internet has made consumer search much easier with consequences for competition, industry structure and product o¤erings. We explore these consequences in a rich but tractable model that allows for strategic design choices. We …nd a polarized market structure, where some …rms choose designs aiming for broad-based audiences, while others target narrow niches. Such an industry structure can a...

Consumer Search and Retail Market Structure

This paper proposes a framework for studying how consumer search and multiproduct purchase a¤ect retail market structure. To provide one-stop shopping convenience and attract more consumers, single-product shops supplying di¤erent products can merge to form a multiproduct retailer. The merger, however, also changes the market structure and a¤ects price competition. When the search friction is n...

The Market Structure for Internet Search Engines

The Internet search engine market has seen a proliferation of entrants over the past few years. Whereas Yahoo was the early market leader, there has been 138 TELANG, RAJAN, AND MUKHOPADHYAY entry by both lower-quality engines and higher-quality ones (such as Google). Prior work on quality differentiation requires that low-quality products have low prices in order to survive in a market with hig...

Market Structure and Price Adjustment in the Iranian Tea Market

Characterizing Optimal Syndicated Sponsored Search Market Design

The analysis to date of sponsored search auctions, originally conducted by Varian and independently by Aggarwal et al., has yet to describe more recent developments such as the emergence of interacting advertising exchanges. This paper assess the significance of such phenomena. Building on Gonen and Vassilvitskii’s model of sponsored search with reserve prices we depict advertising networks as ...