For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor to succeed their business. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. This model however emphasizes on the use of customer information for benefiting enterprises; customers in contrast receive less informat...

U aggregate product search data from Amazon.com, we jointly estimate consumer information search and online demand for consumer durable goods. To estimate the demand and search primitives, we introduce an optimal sequential search process into a model of choice and treat the observed market-level product search data as aggregations of individual-level optimal search sequences. The model builds ...

Economists in the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Economics perform economic analysis support dual missions to protect consumers and competition by preventing anticompetitive, deceptive, unfair business practices through law enforcement, advocacy, education. This article first presents summaries analyses that FTC economists performed estimate consumer harm from two different types dec...

The rent of shelter accounts for approximately a third of the Consumer Price Index (CPI). Using a new housing rent index (RRI) developed by Ambrose, Coulson, and Yoshida (2014), we modify the CPI and compute the Taylor rule for the period from 2000 to 2010. With this timely rent index, Taylor rule becomes more consistent with the Federal funds rate than the conventional calculations. However, t...

This article studies the influence of product groupings on consumer preferences. Specifically, it is proposed that when each product in two groups has an equal chance of a gain, consumers prefer to choose from a group that appears more contagious (e.g., products arranged close together, similarly, or symmetrically). However, when each product in two groups has an equal chance of a loss, consume...

I develop a multi-country multi-industry model of trade that features heterogeneous consumers with non-homothetic preferences. I use the model to quantify the measurement errors in the welfare gains estimates caused by the assumption of a representative consumer (ARC). First, I reduce the world level of all trade costs by 15% and find that ARC overestimates (underestimates) the gains of the poo...

We conduct an incentivized experiment to test whether the willingness to pay is higher for debit cards compared to cash for three consumer products. Our findings support this conjecture also after controlling for cash availability, spending type, price familiarity and consumption habits of the products. The evidence thus suggests that different representations of money matters for consumer beha...

We model unobserved preference heterogeneity in demand systems as random Barten scales in utility functions. These Barten scales appear as random coefficients multiplying prices in demand functions. Consumer demands are nonlinear in prices and may have unknown functional structure. We therefore prove identification of additive Generalized Random Coefficients models, defined as additive nonparam...

Estimation of flexible functional forms for large consumer or producer demand systems is often precluded due to computational difficulties or due to a lack of degrees of freedom. We propose the concept of a semiflexible form, which is a special case of a flexible form but which requires fewer free parameters. Our proposed method of estimation allows the researcher to choose the degree of flexib...

As we outline a movement beyond the apparent creative stagnation in the videogames industry we envision possible transformations, beyond the gridlock a producer-consumer dichotomy, that propose to mobilize players as creative actors in a holistic experience. We propose to recognize the authoring roles players develop in their relation to the industry and the gaming community, that configure an ...