Beliefs and Consumer Search in a Vertical Industry
研究消费者对价格偏差责任方的信念如何影响制造商与零售商之间的批发和零售定价，发现当消费者认为上游制造商至少部分负责时，均衡结果发生质变，能解释零售价格刚性、成本传导不足等现象。
Abstract This paper studies vertical relations in a search market. As the wholesale arrangement between a manufacturer and its retailers is typically unobserved by consumers, their beliefs about who is to be blamed for a price deviation play a crucial role in determining wholesale and retail prices. The common assumption in the consumer search literature is that consumers exclusively blame an individual retailer for a price deviation. We show that in the vertical relations context, predictions based on this assumption are not robust in the sense that if consumers hold the upstream manufacturer at least partially responsible for the deviation, equilibrium predictions are qualitatively different. For robust beliefs, the vertical model can explain a variety of observations, such as retail price rigidity (or, alternatively, low cost pass-through), nonmonotonicity of retail prices in search costs, and (seemingly) collusive retail behavior. The model can be used to study a monopoly online platform that sells access to final consumers.