소규모 지방시장에서의 Noisy 연속검색과 인터넷의 효과

This study consider the effect of the Internet on consumers' noisy sequential search. We explore the price competition in a local homogeneous product market where some consumers having Internet connection can search all prices costless through seller’s web sites, while other consumers not being Internet user implement noisy sequential search by paying some positive cost for a local news paper. The types of equilibrium depend on the amount of the probability of how many price quotations will be observed from one noisy search. Under this circumstance two types of equilibrium are possible, which are competitive price equilibrium in pure pricing strategies and dispersed price equilibrium in mixed pricing strategies. Hence, if all nonnetizen consumers doing noisy search receive price quotations above one per search, then there will Bertrand price competition in the market and sellers have to choose marginal pricing strategy. And if the probability of one price quotation will be observed from one noisy search is one or a value in between 0 and 1, then the unique market equilibrium is a dispersed price equilibrium, symmetric mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. This implies equilibrium price dispersion is a persistent phenomenon. Contrary to a result of Burdett and Judd (1983), the existence of netizen consumers able to search all prices costless rules out monopoly price equilibrium in the market. Hence, the introduction of the Internet to the local market gives all consumers some benefits and local sellers some loses. In this case, however, the effect of Internet on social welfare is not clear. It may depend on the relative size of the deadweight loss in monopoly to the total construction costs of sellers’ web sites.