Pricing in Competitive Search Markets: The Roles of Price Information and Fairness Perceptions
通过竞争性搜索实验，研究买方信息与公平感知如何影响市场价格，发现公平感知对买卖双方行为有显著驱动作用。
We use a competitive search (price-posting) framework to experimentally examine how buyer information and fairness perceptions affect market behavior. We observe that moving from zero to one uninformed buyers leads to higher prices in both 2 (seller)×2 (buyer) and 2 × 3 markets: the former as predicted under standard preferences, the latter the opposite of the theoretical prediction. Perceptions of fair prices—elicited in the experiment—are a powerful driver of behavior. For buyers, fair prices correlate with price responsiveness, which varies systematically across treatments and impacts sellers’ pricing incentives. For sellers, fair prices correlate with underpricing, which also varies systematically across treatments. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2620 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.