Relationship between Uncertainty and Patterns of Pre-purchase Consumer Search in Electronic Markets

Electronic markets are expected to facilitate consumer information search and product comparison to the extent that consumers are able to accumulate nearly perfect information. We present an analysis of search patterns based on a laboratory experiment on product search processes. We identified three types of search patterns in our experiment: sequential, simultaneous, and iterative. We found that search pattern has an impact on search costs and the efficiency of search judged by the purchase price. Sequential search emerged as the still dominant search pattern even though it leads to the most expensive purchase. Simultaneous search seems to combine low search costs with the highest efficiency. Iterative search pattern was the slowest. We also studied the relationship between uncertainty and search pattern, because uncertainty should have an effect on the search pattern employed. We found that uncertainty is strongly related to search behavior, but not to the search pattern employed.