David S. Johnson, Stephen B. Reed, and Kenneth J. Stewart The report by the U.S. Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index (known more commonly as the Boskin Report), issued on December 4, 1996, addressed the broad conceptual question of whether a cost-of-living index (COLI) should be the measurement objective of a price index and focused attention on three key problems inherent in ...

T his article examines cross-price promotional effects in a dynamic context. Among other things, we investigate whether previously established findings hold when consumer and competitive dynamics are taken into account. Five main influential effects (asymmetric price effect, neighborhood price effect, asymmetric share effect, neighborhood share effect, and private label versus national brand as...

We estimate a random utility model of demand to measure consumer response to package downsizing in consumer goods markets. To our knowledge this paper provides the first estimates of consumer response to package size. We perform the analysis using Nielsen Homescan data on bulk ice cream purchases of a panel of households in Chicago, between 1998 and 2007. The estimation framework involves model...

We analyze the welfare impacts of price discrimination in a two-dimensional spatial differentiation model. Consumer information of varying qualities is available on one dimension which allows firms to price discriminate, and better information leads to more refined price discrimination. We find that as information quality improves, firms’ profits monotonically increase while consumer surplus an...

China has been moving out from its country into other countries in the world, including Malaysia, with some positive and negative news. We are to examine the impact of China’s investment on our employment, price level and productivity as well as sectoral stock market performances: consumer products and services; construction and industrial sectors. The causality analyses on quarterly data from ...

This paper explores whether and how a firm should adapt its strategy in view of consumer use of prior customer ratings. Specifically, we consider optimal pricing and whether the firm should offer an unexpected frill to early customers to enhance their product experiences. We show that if price history is unobserved by consumers, a forward-looking firm should always modify its strategy from sing...

This paper introduces a dynamic equilibrium model of the research-based pharmaceutical industry and parameterizes it using industry facts. In the model, imposing price controls in the U.S. reduces firm value, R&D, the flow of new drugs, and the net present value of consumer welfare in the U.S. and globally. Removing price controls in one or more non-U.S. countries increases firm value, R&D, the...

BACKGROUND Health literacy presents an enormous challenge in the delivery of effective healthcare and quality outcomes. We evaluated the impact of low health literacy (LHL) on healthcare utilization and healthcare expenditure. METHODS Database analysis used Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2005-2008 which provides nationally representative estimates of healthcare utilization and e...

The online infomediary, playing an important role in e-commerce, provides more unbiased and refined product information than usual advertisement provided by online retailers. Interestingly, depending on its capability, the quality of product information is likely to differ. Also, given the fact that it enables consumers to grasp market price dispersion of products, the context of online infomed...

The Bureau of Labor Statistics rounds the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to a single decimal place before releasing it, and the published CPI inflation series is calculated from those rounded index values. While rounding has only a relatively small effect on the level of the CPI series at present, it can have a significant effect on CPI inflation, the monthly percent changes in the CPI. This paper ...