Rising Food Prices and Household Welfare: Evidence from Brazil in 2008 Food price inflation in Brazil in the twelve months to June 2008 was 18 percent, while overall inflation was 5.3 percent. This paper uses spatially disaggregated monthly data on consumer prices and two different household surveys to estimate the welfare consequences of these food price increases, and their distribution acros...

A monopoly sells a network good to large population of consumers. We explore how the monopoly's profit and consumer surplus vary with arrival public information about structure. The analysis reveals that, under homogeneous preferences for good, degree assortativity ensures that increases both surplus. In contrast, heterogeneous can create tension between profit.

Sequential Search with Refinement: Model and Application with Click-stream Data We propose a structural model of consumer sequential search under uncertainty about attribute levels of products. Our identification of the search model relies on exclusion restriction variables that separate consumer utility and search cost. Because such exclusion restrictions are often available in online click-st...

This paper revisits the traditional view that a low-price guarantee results in higher prices and facilitates collusion. I acquired accurate data on matching stores and their competitors to address the common criticism of the scant existing empirical literature that their results are highly dependent on getting the market de nitions right. Using station level data in the retail gasoline industry...

Travel cost and contingent valuation methods are applied to the problem of estimating the potential consumer surpltrs avai!abfe to international nature tourists from a rain forest conservation project in Madagascar. Data are derived from srrrveys of nature tourists in Madagascar and international, nature tolrrism professionals in the U.S. and Europe. Typical trip travel cost models are used to ...

Loss Leading pricing is often referred to as an advertising strategy which allows retailers to attract consumers by subsidizing some products and make profits from other items; in this way, below-cost pricing may improve consumer welfare by compensating consumers for their lack of information. This paper shows that large retailers can instead use loss leading as an exploitative device at the de...

We examine the e¤ects of mobile termination rate regulation in asymmetric oligopolies. We do this by extending existing models of asymmetric duopoly and symmetric oligopoly where consumer expectations about market shares are passive. We …rst calibrate product di¤erentiation parameters using detailed data from the Spanish market from 2010. Next, we predict equilibrium outcomes and welfare e¤ects...

Increasingly detailed consumer information makes sophisticated price discrimination possible. At fine levels of aggregation, demand may not obey standard regularity conditions. We propose a new randomized sales mechanism for such environments. Bidders can “buy-it-now” at a posted price, or “take-a-chance” in an auction where the top d > 1 bidders are equally likely to win. The randomized alloca...

This paper provides a theoretical rationale for non-binding retail price recommendations (RPRs) in vertical supply relations. Analyzing a bilateral manufacturer-retailer relationship with repeated trade, we show that linear relational contracts can implement the surplus-maximizing outcome. If the manufacturer has private information about production costs or consumer demand, RPRs may serve as a...

We compare personalized and history-based pricing and show that personalized pricing harms consumer surplus and total welfare when evaluated over a two-period horizon. The model is characterized by two key features: 1. The discounted two-period profits are invariant to whether personalized or history-based pricing is applied because higher period-2 profits with personalized pricing are offset b...