Online Shopping Intermediaries: The Strategic Design of Search Environments
研究在线购物中介如何通过设计搜索环境（如搜索辅助工具）来影响消费者的搜索成本，进而影响消费者评估卖家和产品的深度与广度，最终实现均衡。
An online shopping intermediary is an Internet platform on which consumers and third-party sellers transact. Shopping intermediaries provide a search environment (e.g., search aids) to lower the search costs incurred by consumers when finding and evaluating sellers’ products. We study strategic incentives of an intermediary in the design of its search environment as a means to ease search costs. An important aspect of our analysis is that consumers optimally decide how many sellers to evaluate and how deeply (e.g., number of attributes) to evaluate each of them. We find that the equilibrium search environment embeds sufficiently high search costs to prevent consumers from evaluating too many sellers, but not too high to cause them to evaluate sellers’ products at partial depth. This paper was accepted by J. Miguel Villas-Boas, marketing.