A Note on Consumer Search, Firm Location Choice, and Welfare
用一个简单例子说明，零售企业集聚虽方便消费者比较，但会增加无谓出行；规划者难以实现最优，市场力量可能导致过度集聚或分散，影响社会福利。
Although geographical concentrations of retail firms facilitate search, such concentrations also increase wasteful travel by consumers. An elementary example shows that (1) it may be impossible for a planner to achieve the first best level of surplus by simply assigning firms to locations and (2) market forces may necessarily lead to clustering when this is even worse than the planner's solution. A modification of the example shows that market forces can result in firms' always locating apart when clustering is the most efficient configuration of firms. Copyright 1993 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.