OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
In this paper, we develop a model of within-firm sequential, directed search and study a firm’s ability and incentive to steer consumers. The paper’s main insight is that the firm often benefits from garbling the information it provides to consumers. This induces consumers to keep searching but discourages some of them from visiting the firm—-a form of garbling overload. The incentive to garble the information arises even though the firm and the consumers have in common the interest of maximizing the probability of trade—-in particular, the setting abstracts from any self-preferencing or bias in favor of particular products. Because of information garbling, an increase in the size of the product line further discourages consumers from visiting the firm—-consistent with choice overload.
