Related papers: Consumer Welfare Under Individual Heterogeneity
Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…
We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…
We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…
We introduce a novel framework for individual-level welfare analysis. It builds on a parametric model for continuous demand with a quasilinear utility function, allowing for heterogeneous coefficients and unobserved individual-good-level…
We develop a nonparametric approach to identify and estimate consumer preferences and unobserved heterogeneity under nonlinear price schedules. Leveraging variation across multiple price schedules, we show that both the utility function and…
Children welfare is at the center of many welfare reforms such as cash transfers to families and training programs to parents. A key goal for policy-makers is to evaluate the costs and benefits of such reforms. The main challenge lies in…
Time-varying electricity pricing better reflects the varying cost of electricity compared to flat-rate pricing. Variations between peak and off-peak costs are increasing due to weather variation, renewable intermittency, and increasing…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
We revisit a classical question of how individual consumer preferences and incomes shape aggregate behavior. We develop a method that applies to populations with homothetic preferences and reduces the hard problem of aggregation to simply…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
We provide a novel inferential framework to estimate the exact affine Stone index (EASI) model, and analyze welfare implications due to price changes caused by taxes. Our inferential framework is based on a non-parametric specification of…
We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…
Based on interactions between individuals and others and references to social norms, this study reveals the impact of heterogeneity in time preference on wealth distribution and inequality. We present a novel approach that connects the…
Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…
We decompose the U.S. consumption inequality distributional changes during the COVID-19 phase. Analyzing the Consumption Expenditure Interview Survey data, we decompose observed changes in consumption inequality into components attributable…
Understanding individual customers' sensitivities to prices, promotions, brands, and other marketing mix elements is fundamental to a wide swath of marketing problems. An important but understudied aspect of this problem is the dynamic…
Berkson errors are commonplace in empirical microeconomics. In consumer demand this form of measurement error occurs when the price an individual pays is measured by the (weighted) average price paid by individuals in a specified group…
Recent efforts have been very successful in accurately mapping welfare in datasparse regions of the world using satellite imagery and other non-traditional data sources. However, the literature to date has focused on predicting a particular…
The problem addressed in this article is the bias to income and expenditure elasticities estimated on pseudo-panel data caused by measurement error and unobserved heterogeneity. We gauge empirically these biases by comparing…