“…A main objective of our article is to extend this discussion and to experimentally examine how credibility issues and cheap talk potentially affect the outcomes of search deterrence under their seminal framework. 2 Most other theoretical articles in this strand of literature focus on the strategic roles of acceptance deadline and information disclosure policy in deterring search, but do not consider credibility issues (Lippman and Mamer, 2012;Zorc and Tsetlin, 2020;Tang et al, 2009;Hu and Tang, 2021;Li and Zhao, 2022;Wang, 2017). 3 The experimental studies on search deterrence focus on exploding offers, without accounting for credibility issues (Tang et al, 2009;Lau et al, 2014).…”