Informative Price Advertising in a Sequential Search Model
构建了一个包含消费者序贯搜索和厂商价格广告的模型，分析广告成本与搜索成本如何影响价格分布、厂商广告行为及市场效率，发现初始广告成本为零时市场趋于完全竞争，但正边际广告成本会导致价格上升且福利不一定改善。
The purpose of this paper is to study the role and implications of price advertising when shopping trips are costly to consumers. To do so, we introduce advertising into an optimal sequential search model. Information about prices is both gathered by consumers and disseminated by firms. Consumers search sequentially and stores advertise (with various intensity) when it is in their interest to do so. Our model has a unique equilibrium exhibiting priee dispersion. The model generates predictions about the shape of the price distribution and firms' advertising behavior. We explore the effects of entry, and find that when initial advertising costs (at zero level of effort) are precisely zero, entry drives the equilibrium to the perfectly competitive outcome. However, when initial marginal advertising costs are positive, entry drives prices higher, and while the informed consumers almost surely locate competitive prices, welfare does not necessarily increase. Finally, we compare the effectiveness of the two informational channels. When advertising costs shrink, prices become competitive; however, when search costs shrink, prices remain bounded above marginal production costs.