This paper empirically explores the degree to which consumers perceive a manufacturer’s warranty as a signal of unobservable product quality. Data on household purchases of new automobiles from the Consumer Expenditure Survey are used to estimate both conditional and mixed logit models of consumer demand, with the indirect utility specification extended to incorporate the impact of manufacturer...

The role of Demand Side Management (DSM) with Distributed Energy Storage (DES) has been gaining attention in recent studies due to the impact of the latter on energy management in the smart grid. In this work, an Energy Scheduling and Distributed Storage (ESDS) algorithm is proposed to be installed into the smart meters of Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing consumers possessing in-home energy storage de...

Smoking is an expensive habit. Smoking households spend, on average, more than $US1000 annually on cigarettes. When a family member quits, in addition to the former smoker's improved long-term health, families benefit because savings from reduced cigarette expenditures can be allocated to other goods. For households in which some members continue to smoke, smoking expenditures crowd-out other p...

Previous research by Tucker et al. (2005) and Tucker et al. (2006) attempts to identify a latent construct that predicts the amount of measurement error in expenditure reports on the Consumer Expenditure Interview Survey (CEIS). While this work was successful in identifying a construct that predicts measurement error in expenditure reports, it is more sensitive to falsely negative reports of th...

A semiparametric model of consumer demand is considered. In the model, the indirect utility function is specified as a partially linear, where utility is nonparametric in expenditure and parametric (with fixedor varying-coefficients) in prices. Because the starting point is a model of indirect utility, rationality restrictions like homogeneity and Slutsky symmetry are easily imposed. The result...

The importance of consumer expenditure information for government planning and econometric analysis is unquestioned. Since procedures for collecting this information vary from country to country, additional methodological research is needed to determine the procedures that yield the most valid results. We report here on three studies conducted by the Survey Research Laboratory of the University...

F amilies receiving public assistance differ from other families not only demographically, but also in the way they spend. Expenditures on basic needs account for a larger share of the assisted families’ spending. Furthermore, when the assisted families are classified by the number of public assistance programs received (such as medicaid, food stamps, and subsidized housing), the data indicate ...

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...

This study examines the changing patterns of consumption of an aging Mexican society with a focus on the age of the householder. To gain insight into aging consumer behavior, relevant consumption theories were reviewed. Regression analysis using various consumption categories as dependent variables were used to test the hypothesis that age of the householder influences consumer expenditure. The...