“Salience and Consumer Choice” Appendices for Online Publication A Extension: Goods with Multiple Quality Attributes

In this Appendix, we extend the model to the case where goods are characterized by multiple attributes. We then study in detail the case where goods differ along two quality attributes. As in Section 2, a consumer evaluates all N > 1 goods in a choice set Cchoice ≡ {qk}k=1,...,N . Each good k is a vector qk = (q1k, . . . , qmk, pk) ∈ R of m > 1 quality attributes, where qik (i = 1, . . . ,m) measures the utility that attribute i generates for the consumer. The case studied in the main text has m = 1. The consumer has full information about the attributes of each good and, absent salience distortions, evaluates qk with a separable utility function: