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Competition and Consumer Confusion

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Author Info
David Laibson
Xavier Gabaix

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Abstract

In many markets consumer biases do not affect prices, since competition forces firms to price their products close to marginal cost; competition protects the consumer. We show that noisy consumer product evaluations undermine the force of competition, enabling firms to charge high mark-ups in equilibrium, even in highly competitive environments. We analyze markets in which rational firms sell goods to consumers who evaluate products with noise. Using results from extreme value theory, we show that competition generally has a remarkably weak impact on markups. For normally distributed evaluation noise, we show that markups are proportional to the inverse of the square root of log(n), where n is the number of competitors. In this setting, a highly competitive industry with n=1,000,000 firms will retain 1/3 of the markup of a highly concentrated industry with only n=10 competitors. When we make noise an endogenous variable, we find that firms choose excess noise by making their products inefficiently confusing. Moreover, competition exacerbates this effect: a higher degree of competition causes firms to choose even more excess complexity. Firms with lower intrinsic quality and higher production costs choose the most excess complexity. Educating consumers to reduce their evaluation noise would generate large welfare gains. But the gains accrue mostly to the consumer, so firms can't profitably educate consumers and steal them away from competitors. Finally, we introduce an econometric framework that measures bounded rationality and confusion in the marketplace

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Paper provided by Econometric Society in its series Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings with number 663.

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Date of creation: 11 Aug 2004
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Handle: RePEc:ecm:nasm04:663

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Related research
Keywords: bounded rationality complexity confusion extreme value theory discrete choice profit behavioral economics behavioral industrial organization mutual fund industry consumer protection

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D00 - Microeconomics - - General - - - General
D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
L00 - Industrial Organization - - General - - - General

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References listed on IDEAS
Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Ali HortaƧ Su & Chad Syverson, 2004. "Product Differentiation, Search Costs, And Competition in the Mutual Fund Industry: A Case Study of S&P 500 Index Funds," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 119(2), pages 403-456, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Perloff, Jeffrey M & Salop, Steven C, 1985. "Equilibrium with Product Differentiation," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 52(1), pages 107-20, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Rosenthal, Robert W, 1980. "A Model in Which an Increase in the Number of Sellers Leads to a Higher Price," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 48(6), pages 1575-79, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Anderson, Simon P & de Palma, Andre & Nesterov, Yurii, 1995. "Oligopolistic Competition and the Optimal Provision of Products," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 63(6), pages 1281-1301, November. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Judd, Kenneth L & Riordan, Michael H, 1994. "Price and Quality in a New Product Monopoly," Review of Economic Studies, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 61(4), pages 773-89, October. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  1. Glenn Ellison & Sara Fisher Ellison, 2004. "Search, Obfuscation, and Price Elasticities on the Internet," NBER Working Papers 10570, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Xavier Gabaix & David Laibson, 2005. "Shrouded Attributes, Consumer Myopia, and Information Suppression in Competitive Markets," NBER Working Papers 11755, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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