Search, Information, and Prices
在相同企业销售同质产品的市场中，给定消费者询价企业数量的事前分布，推导出销售价格均衡分布的紧上界，该上界适用于企业对价格分布的各种共同先验高阶信念模型。
Consider a market with identical firms offering a homogeneous good. For any given ex ante distribution of the price count (the number of firms from which a consumer obtains a quote), we derive a tight upper bound on the equilibrium distribution of sales prices. The bound holds across all models of firms’ common-prior higher-order beliefs about the price count, including the extreme cases of full information and no information. One implication of our results is that a small ex ante probability that the price count is equal to one can lead to a large increase in the expected price. The bound also applies in a large class of models where the price count distribution is endogenously determined.