Price Transparency, Search, and Collusion in Markets

在线搜索平台和开放数据政策正在涌现，为消费者提供价格信息，以便在市场上做出决策，但也可能导致共谋定价。该项目旨在通过将关于公司定价和消费者搜索的大型实时数据集与自然和现场实验相结合，来研究搜索平台的竞争影响。该项目预计将促进串通、消费者搜索和平台采用的新模式的开发。这应该会产生实质性的好处，通过针对串通的新颖数据驱动屏幕来实现数字时代的竞争政策现代化，以及鼓励平台采用和使消费者能够在决策中使用数据的政策，以增加市场竞争。

Online search platforms and 'open data' policies are emerging to empower consumers with price information for decision-making in markets, yet also can enable collusive pricing. This project aims to study the competitive impact of search platforms by combining large, real-time datasets on firm pricing and consumer search with natural and field experiments. The project expects to facilitate the development of new models of collusion, consumer search, and platform adoption. This should yield substantial benefit by modernizing competition policy for the digital age through novel data-driven screens for collusion, and policies to encourage platform adoption and enable consumers’ use of data in decision-making to increase competition in markets.