讲座题目：Consumer Search with Blind Buying

报告人：喻俊

报告时间：2021年6月9日（周三）上午10:00

报告地点：经管院A208

主办单位：武汉大学经济与管理学院数理经济与数理金融系

主持人：孙祥

内容摘要：This article proposes a sequential search model in which consumers freely observe products' prices and prior values before a search and decide whether and in which order to identify the match values for a positive search cost. We allow consumers to purchase a product without incurring a search cost to inspect the match value, which we call "blind buying", under which the optimal search policy is no longer as per Weitzman (1979). When the match value has a symmetric distribution, both consumers and firms are indifferent to the search order, conditional on that blind buying does not take place in the first stage. We show that blind buying always increases total welfare, and increases market prices and industrial profits if and only if the first-sample search cost is below a threshold value. An increase in the search cost reduces equilibrium prices. Such a result is consistent with existing price-directed search models, but the underlying mechanisms are different. We also show that being prominent can adversely affect a firm if the match value is asymmetrically distributed, which contrasts the literature.

主讲人简介：喻俊，本科毕业于武汉大学经济与管理学院数理经济与数理金融系（高级研究中心），2014年于美国西北大学（Northwestern University）获得经济学博士学位，现为上海财经大学经济学院常任副教授，研究方向包括微观经济理论，产业组织理论和消费者搜寻理论。