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Shopping for Information: Consumer Learning with Optimal Pricing and Product Design

SSRN, ISSN: 1556-5068
2017
  • 0
    Citations
  • 881
    Usage
  • 3
    Captures
  • 0
    Mentions
  • 0
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Usage
    881
    • Abstract Views
      750
    • Downloads
      131
  • Captures
    3
  • Ratings
    • Download Rank
      438,334

Article Description

I study a monopolistic pricing problem in which the consumer performs product research to determine whether or not to purchase a good. The consumer receives a signal of quality via a Brownian motion process with a type-dependent drift. I fully characterize the consumer’s optimal strategy; she buys the product when she is sufficiently optimistic about the quality and ceases to pay for the signal when she is sufficiently pessimistic. I examine the implications of this behavior for the seller’s optimal pricing decision. I find that the seller prefers to encourage product research when quality is likely to be high and prefers to discourage research when quality is likely to be low. I show that a decrease in search costs or an increase in the quality of information can either raise or lower equilibrium price. I also extend the model so that the seller chooses both price and the level of quality dispersion and demonstrate that the optimal level of dispersion need not be extremal.

Bibliographic Details

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