Experimentation and Competition
研究竞争如何影响企业通过实验了解市场需求的努力，发现竞争会削弱企业实验的激励，且搜索成本越小，削弱效应越强，并解释了渗透定价、撇脂定价和周期性定价等经验现象。
This paper examines the effect of competition on firms’ efforts to experiment and learn about market demand. Consumers are assumed to know prices only at sellers they have actually visited, but must bear search costs to find the prices of other sellers. Under these conditions we show that firms’ incentives to experiment are diluted by comparison with the monopoly case and that this effect is stronger the smaller the search cost. The learning environment we portray gives rise to several time paths which have been empirically documented, including penetration pricing, cream-skimming and cyclical pricing