Abstract
At the beginning of the third millennium, the market for financial services is undergoing a fundamental shift and it is questionable whether the traditional approach of selling financial commodity products in increasingly transparent and global markets will still be profitable in the future. Applying search cost theory, the gap of two formerly separately analysed search methods - sequential and simultaneous search - is filled in this article to contribute to the explanation of customer buying behaviour in an electronic commodity market such as the market for retail financial (commodity) products. The results suggest a strong preference for the simultaneous search method and consequently a strong pressure on margins. The set-up of the model and the theoretical results are confronted with empirical evidence from a study about the German retail financial services' market with respect to comparison shopping.
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