Consumer Search with Chain Stores
b'The Stahl model is one of the most applied consumer search models, with many\\napplications and an empirical background. The present paper explores an extension\\nwhere sellers have asymmetries, which is mostly excluded by the literature. Sellers\\nwith heterogeneous numbers of stores are introduced, reflecting a typical market\\nstructure. As in the original Stahl model, a market consists of several sellers, and\\nconsumers, where some face a cost when sequentially searching. The paper shows\\nthat no symmetric Nash equilibrium exists in the extension. Additional results\\nsuggest that smallest sellers will be the ones offering the lowest prices, in line with\\nseveral real world examples provided in the paper. However, profits remain in most\\ncases fixed per store, making a larger firm more profitable, yet with lower quantity\\nsold. The findings suggest that on some level price dispersion will still exist, together with some level of price stickiness, both observed in reality.'