Benabou, Roland. <br/><br/>
The Informativeness of Prices:  Search With Learning and Cost Uncertainty / 
Roland Benabou, Robert Gertner. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  1991. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w3833 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w3833. .
<br/><br/> September 1991. 
<br/><br/> Aggregate cost uncertainty, arising from real shocks or unanticipated inflation, reduces the informativeness of prices by scrambling relative and aggregate variations. But when agents can acquire additional information, such increased noise may in fact lead them to become better informed, and price competition will intensify. We examine these issues in a model of search with learning, where consumers search optimally from an unknown price distribution while firms price optimally given consumers' search rules. We show that the decisive factor in whether inflation variability increases or reduces the incentive to search, and thereby market efficiency, is the size of informational costs. 
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