CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2015
| Author | Kiss, András Péter |
|---|---|
| Title | Essays on Consumer Search and Switching |
| Summary | The thesis consists of three single-authored chapters on consumer search and switching behavior. Chapter 1 looks at markets where information intermediaries, such as price comparison websites, help people in their search for the best offers. I build a theoretical model to examine the economic forces that drive the market structure of platforms towards, or away from, monopolization, and conclude that the latter ones will prevail. Chapters 2 and 3 are empirical investigations on the switching behavior of consumers in the auto liability insurance market in Hungary. Both chapters are based on a unique, contract-level dataset that I collected from an insurance brokerage firm. In Chapter 2, I exploit a change in market regulation to estimate the causal effect of an advertising campaign on switching rates. The campaign's effect is large and mainly works through drawing people's attention to the switching opportunity. In Chapter 3, I employ the dataset on insurance contracts to estimate switching costs in the market. I modify a standard two-period multinomial choice model by including the possibility of inattention to switching, which turns out to be a significant improvement to the econometric model's fit to the data and produces much more plausible results. |
| Supervisor | Kondor, Péter |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2015/kiss_andras.pdf |
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