Consumer Search Markets with Costly Second Visits

This is the first paper on consumer search where the cost of going back to stores already searched is explicitly taken into account. We show that the optimal sequential search rule under costly second visits is very different from the traditional reservation price rule in that it is nonstationary and not independent of previously sampled prices. We explore the implications of costly second visits on market equilibrium in two celebrated search models. In the Wolinsky model some consumers search beyond the first firm and in this class of models costly second visits do make a substantive difference: equilibrium prices under costly second visits can both be higher and lower than their perfect recall analogues. In the oligopoly search model of Stahl where consumers do not search beyond the first firm, there remains a unique symmetric equilibrium that has firms use pricing strategies that are identical to the perfect recall case.

Optimal Switching Strategy between Admission Control and Pricing Control Policies with Two Types of Customers and Search Costs

This paper presents a switching strategy between the admission control and the pricing control policies in a queueing system with two types of customers. For an arriving first-type customer, the decision maker has an option on which policy to choose between the two control policies; that is, one determines whether or not to admit the customer’s request for the service (admission control) or decides a price of the customer’s request and offers it to the customer (pricing control). The second-type customers are only served when no first-type customers are present in the system in order to prevent the system from being idle. This would yield an extra income, which we refer to as the sideline profit. The so-called search cost, which is a cost paid to search for customers, creates the search option on whether to continue the search or not. We clarify the properties of the optimal switching strategy as well as the optimal search policy in relation to the sideline profit in order to maximize the total expected net profit. In particular, we show that when the sideline profit is sufficiently large, the two optimal switching thresholds exist with respect to the number of first-type customers in the system

K-function and Optimal Stopping Problems

In this paper a certain function of the real number x, referred to as the K-function, is defined and its some properties are examined. We reveal the close relation of the function to some optimal stopping problems by demonstrating that it plays important roles in the examination of the structures of their optimal decision rule