Oligopolistic markets with sequential search and production cost uncertainty
研究了消费者不知晓企业生产成本时，企业序贯搜索博弈的均衡，发现企业定价更高、利润更大，且预期价格和消费者福利随企业数量非单调变化。
This article analyzes a sequential search model where firms face identical but stochastic production costs, the realizations of which are unknown to consumers. We characterize a perfect Bayesian equilibrium satisfying a reservation price property and provide a sufficient condition for such an equilibrium to exist. We show that (i) firms set on average higher prices and make larger profits compared to the scenario where consumers observe production costs, (ii) expected prices and consumer welfare can be non‐monotonic in the number of firms, and (iii) the impact of production cost uncertainty vanishes as the number of firms becomes very large.