Price Transparency, Search, and Collusion in Markets

在线搜索平台和“开放数据”政策正在兴起，赋予消费者市场决策所需的价格信息，但也可能导致串通定价。该项目旨在通过将企业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，研究搜索平台的竞争影响。该项目预计将促进共谋、消费者搜索和平台采用新模式的发展。通过新颖的数据驱动的共谋屏幕，以及鼓励平台采用并使消费者在决策中使用数据以增加市场竞争的政策，这将使数字时代的竞争政策现代化，从而产生实质性的好处。

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.