Cost-Benefit Models for Explaining Consumer Choice and Information Seeking Behavior

While it provides excellent descriptions of behavior, existing consumer research on information seeking and processing largely fails to explain why consumers engage in various types of activities. This paper presents an economic framework for measuring costs/benefits of search behavior which can help to resolve these questions. This work shows how such a framework can lead to testable hypotheses about information seeking, and discusses how operational measures of economic incentives to search can be developed and employed.