Premium
Consumer obfuscation by a multiproduct firm
Author(s) -
Petrikaitė Vaiva
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the rand journal of economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.687
H-Index - 108
eISSN - 1756-2171
pISSN - 0741-6261
DOI - 10.1111/1756-2171.12225
Subject(s) - incentive , obfuscation , product (mathematics) , order (exchange) , microeconomics , search cost , business , economics , industrial organization , marketing , computer science , computer security , geometry , mathematics , finance
This article shows that a multiproduct firm has incentives to obfuscate its products by using search costs to induce consumers to search through its products in a particular order. The consumers who draw high valuations of the first product terminate their search earlier than the consumers who draw low valuations. Thus, the firm has incentives to raise the price of the earlier searched product. The optimal search cost for an obfuscated product is such that consumers inspect the product only if the match values of the previously searched goods have been very poor.