TALKING, SEARCHING, AND PRICING*
研究了消费者之间的人际沟通如何影响他们获取价格信息的动力以及企业的定价行为，发现沟通水平提高会减少消费者主动搜索信息，并在搜索成本低时使企业定价不那么激进。
I study the implications of interpersonal communication for incentives for consumers to acquire information and firms’ pricing behavior. Firms market a homogeneous product and choose its price; consumers acquire price information at some cost to themselves. Also, each consumer accesses the information acquired by a sample of other consumers— interpersonal communication . An exogenous increase in the level of interpersonal communication decreases the information that consumers acquire, and, when search costs are low, firms price less aggressively. In an extension, consumers may choose to invest in interpersonal communication at some cost. A decrease in the costs of interpersonal communication decreases firms’ competition.