IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03519685.html

Asymmetric cost pass-through and consumer search: empirical evidence from online platforms

Author

Listed:
  • Sven Heim

    (CERNA i3 - Centre d'économie industrielle i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Prices often react stronger to rising than to falling costs. This asymmetric cost pass-through is still not fully understood, but recent theories suggest that asymmetric adjustments of consumers’ search efforts to rising and to falling prices may be one explanation for this pattern. I use novel panel data to investigate the interaction of consumer search intensity, pricing and cost pass-through of residential electricity tariffs on online price comparison sites. I find that consumers search slightly more when prices rise but drastically decrease search efforts when they fall. Moreover, I find direct evidence that cost pass-through heavily depends on consumers’ search efforts in that cost increases are passed-through less to the consumer when search intensity is high while cost decreases are passed-through more when search intensity is high. This finding may help upstream firms to better understand how their price changes will translate into retail price adjustments.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Sven Heim, 2021. "Asymmetric cost pass-through and consumer search: empirical evidence from online platforms," Post-Print hal-03519685, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03519685
    DOI: 10.1007/s11129-021-09233-2
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Thiago Cacicedo, 2022. "Cartels and asymmetric cost pass-through: evidence from Brazilian gas stations," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 42(4), pages 2034-2042.
    2. Montag, Felix & Mamrak, Robin & Sagimuldina, Alina & Schnitzer, Monika, 2023. "Imperfect price information, market power, and tax pass-through," Working Papers 337, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    3. Xu, Jiayi & Zhang, Xiao-Bing & Liu, Yang, 2024. "Asymmetric search behavior for gasoline prices: Evidence from the Chinese gasoline market," International Review of Economics & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 89(PB), pages 699-712.
    4. Felix Montag & Robin Mamrak & Alina Sagimuldina & Monika Schnitzer, 2023. "Imperfect Price Information, Market Power, and Tax Pass-Through," Rationality and Competition Discussion Paper Series 414, CRC TRR 190 Rationality and Competition.
    5. Germeshausen, Robert & Heim, Sven & Wagner, Ulrich J., 2025. "Support for renewable energy: The case of wind power," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 250(C).
    6. Omid Zamani & Thomas Bittmann & Jens‐Peter Loy, 2024. "Does the internet bring food prices closer together? Exploring search engine query data in Iran," Journal of Agricultural Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 75(2), pages 688-715, June.
    7. Christos Genakos & Blair Yuan Lyu & Mario Pagliero, 2024. "Asymmetric pass-through and competition," CEP Discussion Papers dp2028, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
    • L11 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance - - - Production, Pricing, and Market Structure; Size Distribution of Firms

    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:hal:journl:hal-03519685. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.