PlumX Metrics
SSRN
Embed PlumX Metrics

Search Revisits

SSRN, ISSN: 1556-5068
2020
  • 1
    Citations
  • 3,081
    Usage
  • 5
    Captures
  • 0
    Mentions
  • 0
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    1
    • Citation Indexes
      1
  • Usage
    3,081
    • Abstract Views
      2,530
    • Downloads
      551
  • Captures
    5
  • Ratings
    • Download Rank
      101,129

Article Description

Why do consumers revisit previously searched products (“search revisits”) before making a purchase decision? Using a detailed click-stream data set from a popular hotel meta-search engine that uniquely identifies the information (photos, reviews, prices etc.) consumers obtained on every product search, we show the following. Search revisits are common, with half of all search sessions where consumers searched two or more hotels including at least one revisit. Surprisingly, most revisit behavior is not driven by consumers’ desire to look at additional information about a product, as assumed in prior work. Rather, in 70% of all revisits, consumers look at a subset of the same information that they saw on previous searches. Also, products revisited for additional information are frequently purchased. In contrast, revisits for the same information are typically short, involve more expensive and lower quality products, and are unlikely to lead to a purchase. Based on these findings, we then investigate a number of explanations for the occurrence of search revisits. Our results are consistent with consumers revisiting either to obtain more information on options they prefer or (more frequently) to eliminate inferior options from their consideration sets (thereby saving on future decision costs). We end by discussing the implications of these and other findings for modeling consumer search behavior and by deriving managerial implications of consideration set elimination for marketing mix decisions, such as ad re-targeting.

Bibliographic Details

Chu (Ivy) Dang; Raluca Ursu; Pradeep K. Chintagunta

Elsevier BV

Multidisciplinary; consumer search; search revisits; incentive-aligned research study; consideration set formation; choice modeling

Provide Feedback

Have ideas for a new metric? Would you like to see something else here?Let us know