Search and price competition

International audienceThis paper qualifies and quantifies what is meant by higher price level and dispersion in an oligopoly market with imperfectly informed consumers for both Fixed Sample Search and Sequential Search. The objective is to identify the conditions under which prices become lower and price dispersion reduces as a function of consumers? information. Surprisingly, the mean price is an increasing function of search intensity and price dispersion is an inverse U-shaped function of the proportion of informed consumers