IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jpolec/doi10.1086-699211.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Competitive Information Disclosure in Search Markets

Author

Listed:
  • Simon Board
  • Jay Lu

Abstract

Buyers often search across sellers to learn which product best fits their needs. We study how sellers manage these search incentives through their disclosure strategies (e.g., product trials, reviews, and recommendations) and ask how competition affects information provision. If sellers can observe the beliefs of buyers or can coordinate their strategies, then there is an equilibrium in which sellers provide the "monopoly level" of information. In contrast, if buyers' beliefs are private, then there is an equilibrium in which sellers provide full information as search costs vanish. Anonymity and coordination thus play important roles in understanding how advice markets work.

Suggested Citation

  • Simon Board & Jay Lu, 2018. "Competitive Information Disclosure in Search Markets," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 126(5), pages 1965-2010.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/699211
    DOI: 10.1086/699211
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/699211
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/699211
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/699211?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Asher Wolinsky, 1986. "True Monopolistic Competition as a Result of Imperfect Information," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 101(3), pages 493-511.
    2. Luis Rayo & Ilya Segal, 2010. "Optimal Information Disclosure," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 118(5), pages 949-987.
    3. Lewis, Tracy R & Sappington, David E M, 1994. "Supplying Information to Facilitate Price Discrimination," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 35(2), pages 309-327, May.
    4. Sourav Bhattacharya & Arijit Mukherjee, 2013. "Strategic information revelation when experts compete to influence," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 44(3), pages 522-544, September.
    5. Giuseppe Moscarini & Lones Smith, 2001. "The Optimal Level of Experimentation," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(6), pages 1629-1644, November.
    6. Jeffrey Clemens & Joshua D. Gottlieb, 2014. "Do Physicians' Financial Incentives Affect Medical Treatment and Patient Health?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(4), pages 1320-1349, April.
    7. Gentzkow, Matthew & Kamenica, Emir, 2017. "Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders and rich signal spaces," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 411-429.
    8. Forand, Jean Guillaume, 2013. "Competing through information provision," International Journal of Industrial Organization, Elsevier, vol. 31(5), pages 438-451.
    9. Alonso, Ricardo & Câmara, Odilon, 2016. "Bayesian persuasion with heterogeneous priors," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 165(C), pages 672-706.
    10. Marco Battaglini, 2002. "Multiple Referrals and Multidimensional Cheap Talk," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(4), pages 1379-1401, July.
    11. Jidong Zhou, 2014. "Multiproduct Search and the Joint Search Effect," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(9), pages 2918-2939, September.
    12. Emir Kamenica, 2008. "Contextual Inference in Markets: On the Informational Content of Product Lines," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 98(5), pages 2127-2149, December.
    13. Simon Board & Marek Pycia, 2014. "Outside Options and the Failure of the Coase Conjecture," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 104(2), pages 656-671, February.
    14. Justin P. Johnson & David P. Myatt, 2006. "On the Simple Economics of Advertising, Marketing, and Product Design," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(3), pages 756-784, June.
    15. Pak Hung Au, 2015. "Dynamic information disclosure," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 46(4), pages 791-823, October.
    16. Robert J. Aumann, 1995. "Repeated Games with Incomplete Information," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262011476, December.
    17. Stigler, George J., 2011. "Economics of Information," Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, vol. 5, pages 35-49.
    18. Li, Fei & Norman, Peter, 2018. "On Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 170(C), pages 66-70.
    19. Matthew Gentzkow & Emir Kamenica, 2017. "Disclosure of endogenous information," Economic Theory Bulletin, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 5(1), pages 47-56, April.
    20. Matthew Gentzkow & Emir Kamenica, 2017. "Competition in Persuasion," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 84(1), pages 300-322.
    21. Paul Milgrom & John Roberts, 1986. "Relying on the Information of Interested Parties," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 17(1), pages 18-32, Spring.
    22. Burdett, Kenneth & Judd, Kenneth L, 1983. "Equilibrium Price Dispersion," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(4), pages 955-969, July.
    23. Diamond, Peter A., 1971. "A model of price adjustment," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 3(2), pages 156-168, June.
    24. Roman Inderst & Marco Ottaviani, 2012. "Competition through Commissions and Kickbacks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 102(2), pages 780-809, April.
    25. Crawford, Vincent P & Sobel, Joel, 1982. "Strategic Information Transmission," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 50(6), pages 1431-1451, November.
    26. Andrew Rhodes, 2015. "Multiproduct Retailing," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 82(1), pages 360-390.
    27. Sourav Bhattacharya & Arijit Mukherjee, 2011. "Strategic Information Revelation when Experts Compete to Influence," Working Paper 453, Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh, revised Jan 2013.
    28. Charalambos D. Aliprantis & Kim C. Border, 2006. "Infinite Dimensional Analysis," Springer Books, Springer, edition 0, number 978-3-540-29587-7, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jay Lu & Simon Board, 2015. "Information Provision and Consumer Search," 2015 Meeting Papers 1427, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    2. Farzaneh Farhadi & Demosthenis Teneketzis, 2022. "Dynamic Information Design: A Simple Problem on Optimal Sequential Information Disclosure," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 12(2), pages 443-484, June.
    3. Au, Pak Hung & Kawai, Keiichi, 2020. "Competitive information disclosure by multiple senders," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 119(C), pages 56-78.
    4. Florian Hoffmann & Roman Inderst & Marco Ottaviani, 2020. "Persuasion Through Selective Disclosure: Implications for Marketing, Campaigning, and Privacy Regulation," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(11), pages 4958-4979, November.
    5. Wu, Jiemai, 2020. "Non-competing persuaders," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 127(C).
    6. Andrew Rhodes & Jidong Zhou, 2019. "Consumer Search and Retail Market Structure," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(6), pages 2607-2623, June.
    7. Winand Emons & Claude Fluet, 2019. "Strategic communication with reporting costs," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 87(3), pages 341-363, October.
    8. Emir Kamenica & Matthew Gentzkow, 2011. "Bayesian Persuasion," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(6), pages 2590-2615, October.
    9. Natalia Fabra & Juan-Pablo Montero, 2022. "Product Lines and Price Discrimination in Markets with Information Frictions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 68(2), pages 981-1001, February.
    10. Levent Celik, 2014. "Information Unraveling Revisited: Disclosure of Horizontal Attributes," Journal of Industrial Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 62(1), pages 113-136, March.
    11. Archishman Chakraborty & Rick Harbaugh, 2014. "Persuasive Puffery," Marketing Science, INFORMS, vol. 33(3), pages 382-400, May.
      • Archishman Chakraborty & Rick Harbaugh, 2012. "Persuasive Puffery," Working Papers 2012-05, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
    12. Tsakas, Elias & Tsakas, Nikolas, 2021. "Noisy persuasion," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 130(C), pages 44-61.
    13. Pak Hung Au & Keiichi Kawai, 2021. "Competitive disclosure of correlated information," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 72(3), pages 767-799, October.
    14. Gentzkow, Matthew & Kamenica, Emir, 2017. "Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders and rich signal spaces," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 411-429.
    15. Tomala, Tristan & Koessler, Frederic & Laclau, Marie, 2018. "Interactive Information Design," HEC Research Papers Series 1260, HEC Paris, revised 02 May 2018.
    16. Bhattacharya, Sourav & Goltsman, Maria & Mukherjee, Arijit, 2018. "On the optimality of diverse expert panels in persuasion games," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 345-363.
    17. Sander Heinsalu, 2023. "Greater search cost reduces prices," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 75(3), pages 923-947, April.
    18. Rosar, Frank, 2017. "Test design under voluntary participation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 104(C), pages 632-655.
    19. Sander Heinsalu, 2018. "Competitive pricing despite search costs if lower price signals quality," Papers 1806.00898, arXiv.org.
    20. Wu, Wenhao, 2023. "Sequential Bayesian persuasion," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 214(C).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jpolec:doi:10.1086/699211. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JPE .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.