Essays On Market Structure Competition And Consumer Behavior

(Cont.) Chapter 3, co-authored with Erik Brynjolfsson and Michael D. Smith, applies a flexible demand model to examine heterogeneous consumer behavior and estimate search benefits and costs across consumers types, based on a unique data set obtained from a major U.S.-based online shopbot. Consumer benefits to search are estimated using a compensating variations approach, by comparing the welfare generated by the first set of offers shown to the consumer in the default screen, and that generated by the entire set of offers. The benefits to searching lower screens are $1.65 for the median consumer, and the cost of carrying an exhaustive search of the offers is a maximum of $1.40 for the median consumer that chooses to search lower screens.