Related papers: Consumer Welfare Under Individual Heterogeneity

We study the interplay of fairness, welfare, and equity considerations in personalized pricing based on customer features. Sellers are increasingly able to conduct price personalization based on predictive modeling of demand conditional on…

This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…

Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…

This paper studies identification and estimation of a dynamic discrete choice model of demand for differentiated product using consumer-level panel data with few purchase events per consumer (i.e., short panel). Consumers are…

Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…

This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…

This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…

We introduce two models of non-parametric random utility for demand systems: the stochastic absolute risk aversion (SARA) model, and the stochastic safety-first (SSF) model. In each model, individual-level heterogeneity is characterized by…

This paper evaluates the dynamic response of economic activity to shocks in uncertainty as percieved by agents.The study focuses on the comparison between the perception of economic uncertainty by manufacturers and consumers.Since…

This paper develops and implements a nonparametric test of Random Utility Models. The motivating application is to test the null hypothesis that a sample of cross-sectional demand distributions was generated by a population of rational…

Studies of micro-level price datasets find more frequent small price increases than decreases, which can be explained by consumer inattention because time-constrained shoppers might ignore small price changes. Recent empirical studies of…

Congestion is a common failure mode of markets, where consumers compete inefficiently on the same subset of goods (e.g., chasing the same small set of properties on a vacation rental platform). The typical economic story is that prices…

The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…

We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting…

Economists are showing increasing interest in the use of text as an input to economic research. Here, we analyse online text to construct a real time metric of welfare. For purposes of description, we call it the Feel Good Factor (FGF). The…

Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…

We study the distributional implications of uncertainty shocks by developing a model that links macroeconomic aggregates to the US distribution of earnings and consumption. We find that: initially, the fraction of low-earning workers…

The objective of this study is applying a utility based analysis to a comparatively efficient design experiment which can capture people's perception towards the various components of a commodity. Here we studied the multi-dimensional…

Understanding consumer behavior is an important task, not only for developing marketing strategies but also for the management of economic policies. Detecting consumption patterns, however, is a high-dimensional problem in which various…

Users increasingly face multiple interface features on one hand, and constraints on available resources (e.g., time, attention) on the other. Understanding the sensitivity of users' well-being to feature type and resource constraints, is…