Rey, Patrick and Nocke, Volker (2024) Consumer search, steering and choice overload. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 132 (N° 5). pp. 1684-1739.

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Abstract

We develop a model of within-firm sequential, directed search and study a
firm’s ability and incentive to steer consumers. We find that the firm often ben- efits from adopting a noisy positioning strategy, which limits the information available to consumers. This induces consumers to keep searching but discour- ages some of them from visiting the firm. This occurs even though the firm and the consumers have in common the interest of maximizing the probability of trade. Because of such noisy positioning, an increase in the size of the product line further discourages consumers from visiting the firm—consistent with choice
overload.