Informational Complementarity
研究发现，当消费者在购买前对产品的共同和特有属性进行顺序搜索时，竞争产品之间会出现互补效应：一种产品降价反而可能增加其他产品的需求。该效应在多种假设下稳健，并可能提高均衡价格和利润。
Many products have similar or common attributes and are thus correlated. We show that, when these attributes are uncertain for consumers, a complementarity effect can arise among competing products in the sense that the lower price of one product may increase the demands for the others. This effect occurs when consumers sequentially search for information about both common and idiosyncratic product attributes before purchase. We characterize the optimal search strategy for the correlated search problem, provide the conditions for the existence of the complementarity effect, and show that the effect is robust under a wide range of alternative assumptions. We further explore the implications of the effect for pricing. When firms compete in price, although product correlation may weaken differentiation between the firms, the complementarity effect owing to correlated search may raise equilibrium price and profit. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.