Objective In real-world markets consumers face search and switching costs. These costs have received significant theoretical consideration in separate literatures. The received wisdom is that search and switching costs have pervasive consequences in markets because they confer market power to the firms. As a result, prices are often dispersed and higher than what are desirable from a welfare standpoint. Despite a significant theoretical effort, search and switching costs are to a large extent ignored when it comes to competition policy and antitrust economics. There are at least three reasons for this omission. One, existing work has largely focused on specific market structures, namely markets with infinitely many firms (search cost literature) or duopolistic (switching cost literature) and therefore has failed to examine oligopolistic market structures (markets with a finite and arbitrary number of firms), far more reaching in real-world markets and central to antitrust economics. Two, the work on identification and quantification of search and switching costs is practically inexistent. Three, in many markets search and switching costs operate at a time and there is no prior work considering both search and switching costs together. This project at developing a series of demand and supply (market) models of the interaction of firms and consumers and corresponding econometrics methods to estimate search and switching costs. As such, the results of the project should be of interest to regulatory and antitrust authorities, in particular in the EU. The Team Leader, a proven high-potential researcher in the field of microeconomics, will form a research Team by combining skills from the fields of economics, mathematics/game theory and statistics/econometrics. The Department of Economics of the University of Groningen, as host organisation, will offer the research group a unique research environment, infrastructure and network to drive the research to scientific excellence. Fields of science social scienceseconomics and businesseconomicseconometricssocial scienceseconomics and businesseconomicsmicroeconomicsengineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuelsfossil energynatural gasnatural sciencesmathematicsapplied mathematicsgame theory Keywords Search costs consumer behaviour econometric tools economic models firm strategic behaviour regulatory measures switching costs Programme(s) FP6-MOBILITY - Human resources and Mobility in the specific programme for research, technological development and demonstration "Structuring the European Research Area" under the Sixth Framework Programme 2002-2006 Topic(s) MOBILITY-3.1 - Marie Curie Excellence Grants (EXT) Call for proposal FP6-2005-MOBILITY-8 See other projects for this call Funding Scheme EIF - Marie Curie actions-Intra-European Fellowships Coordinator RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN (UNIVERSITY OF GRONINGEN) EU contribution No data Address Broerstraat 5 GRONINGEN Netherlands See on map Links Website Opens in new window Total cost No data
