On Socializing and Social Distancing in Markets: Implications for Retail Prices, Store-level Consumer Density, and Disease Transmission / Ricardo Lagos.

By:

Lagos, Ricardo

Contributor(s):

National Bureau of Economic Research

Material type: Text

TextSeries: Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) ; no. w27724.Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2020.Description: 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white)Subject(s):

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Abstract: I generalize the "noisy search" model of Burdett and Judd (1983) to settings where individual buyers have preferences over the number of other buyers who visit the same seller as them. I consider a version in which buyers have a preference for social distancing derived from the risk of contracting a disease from other buyers, and use it to study the two-way equilibrium interaction between supply-side considerations (such as the distribution of prices posted by sellers) and individual buyers' behavioral responses to the risk of contagion. I find that the price response to the buyers' shift toward social distancing can be an important determinant of the degree to which buyers' individual behavioral responses to the risk of contagion can mitigate the spread of the disease.

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Item type	Home library	Collection	Call number	Status	Date due	Barcode	Item holds
Working Paper	Biblioteca Digital	Colección NBER	nber w27724 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	Not For Loan

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August 2020.

I generalize the "noisy search" model of Burdett and Judd (1983) to settings where individual buyers have preferences over the number of other buyers who visit the same seller as them. I consider a version in which buyers have a preference for social distancing derived from the risk of contracting a disease from other buyers, and use it to study the two-way equilibrium interaction between supply-side considerations (such as the distribution of prices posted by sellers) and individual buyers' behavioral responses to the risk of contagion. I find that the price response to the buyers' shift toward social distancing can be an important determinant of the degree to which buyers' individual behavioral responses to the risk of contagion can mitigate the spread of the disease.