Joint search for several goods

Abstract Joint search occurs when a buyer incurs a single cost to observe prices of several different goods. If the prices are drawn from a known joint distribution function, the optimal sequential strategy with no recall uses a reservation sum for any subset of items. When the observed prices total more than the corresponding reservation sum, not all goods will be bought and search continues for items not purchased. Thus, regions in the price space are associated with various buy-search decisions. The reservation sums, however, have properties analogous to those of the reservation price with search for one good.