Consumer sorting and hedonic valuation of wine attributes: exploiting data from a field experiment

This article uses a novel experimental approach to measure consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for wine attributes. We invited customers of a local supermarket who had selected a bottle of wine to purchase to participate in a valuation experiment. Integrating their original wine choice into the experiment, each participant evaluated six alternative wines, generating a rich set of data on willingness to pay and consumer characteristics. The data from the experiment allow us to compare standard shelf price‐based wine attribute valuation estimates with estimates using WTP data and an increasing amount of information about individual consumers. The full model employs individual fixed effects to estimate WTP parameters without bias from consumer sorting or supply side influences. Our WTP estimates for wine attributes differ markedly from previous attribute value estimates. Consumers in our sample display clear and stable preferences for wine varieties, but less clear preferences for appellations. Our results suggest caution is needed in using market prices to estimate parameters of the consumer valuation function for product attributes.     

Estimating Value Creation from Revealed Preferences: Application to Value‐based Strategies

Research summary : We develop and apply a new set of empirical tools consistent with the tenets of value‐based business strategies, leveraging the principle that “no good deal comes undone” and the methods of revealed preferences, to empirically estimate drivers of value creation. We demonstrate how to use these tools in an analysis of value creation in buyer–supplier relationships in the UK corporate legal market. We show that our approach can uncover evidence of subtle mechanisms that traditional methods cannot easily distinguish from each other. Furthermore, we show how the estimates can be used as parameters of biform games for out‐of‐sample analyses of strategic decisions. With readily available data on relationships between firms, this approach can be applied to many other contexts of interest to strategy researchers. Managerial summary : Managers need to understand the drivers of value creation for customers in order to make competitive positioning decisions and understand when they can capture value under competition. However, estimates of the relative importance of each driver are typically difficult to obtain. In this article, we help remedy this problem by demonstrating a novel method that obtains estimates of the contribution of various drivers of value creation from commonly available data of buyer–supplier relationships. These estimates can then be used to inform the strategy‐making process. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE ‘WHO AND WHY’ OF LOTTERY: EMPIRICAL HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SEMINAL ECONOMIC LITERATURE

Lotteries operate today in many countries around the world. This type of gambling is usually run by governments and is sometimes described as regressive. Lottery is an unfair bet, so explaining the purchase of lottery tickets by risk‐averse consumers has been a challenge for economic theory. Lotteries can be analysed from either of two economic perspectives: as a source of public revenue or as a consumer commodity. In this paper the state of economic research on lotteries is reviewed, focusing on its main empirical findings.     

Food Away from Home Expenditures in the United States

This study investigates the factors affecting food away from home expenditures in the United States using county level data. Results generally indicate that counties with higher labor force participation rate of women, higher number of college graduates, higher number of employed individuals, higher number of females, and higher number of whites and AsianslPacific Islanders as well as counties with lower number of hispanics and lower number of family households spend more on food away from home than others.     

Aspects of profitability that influence smallholder cash-crop preferences in northern Mozambique

This study analyses profitability in terms of relationships between various aspects, indicators and cash-crop cultivation preferences. Both financial and pragmatic aspects of profitability were found to be related to cash-crop preferences. Apart from the need to promote a crop with a good farm gate price and to reduce production and marketing costs, promoters need to strengthen the wider system by supporting profitability as well as household consumption requirements. The correlation between indicators of expected profitability improved as more financial and pragmatic aspects were incorporated. Smallholder farmers' rankings of profitability correlated better with cash-crop preferences when the analysis incorporated more aspects of profitability. In addition, the results indicated the institutional support needed to improve the profitability of cash crops. This simple method of identifying smallholder preferences for one cash crop among many is of paramount importance in the design of strategies for improving agricultural market participation.     

Should the Good and the Selfish be Taxed Differently?*

In this paper, we consider an environment where individual actions have externalities and two types of agents exist: agents with social preferences (the good) and selfish agents. Selfish agents have pay‐off functions that do not take into account social welfare. The pay‐off of an agent is a linear combination of social welfare and the pay‐off of a selfish agent. We demonstrate that the corrective tax rates that maximize social welfare do not depend on the degree of social preferences. Hence, the good and the selfish should not be taxed differently.     

Measuring Women's Quality of Life: A Discussion of Alternative Approaches

This paper reports our experiences with the application of a number of alternative approaches to a study of women's economic circumstances and quality of life in a typical western city. The important work of, especially, Martha Nussbaum on the capabilities approach to evaluations of “quality of life” has highlighted pitfalls associated with the use of a narrow informational base in studies of women's lives and has emphasized the value of qualitative methods in these evaluations. However, to date, most discussions of the relevance of plural approaches to studies of women's lives have been conducted in the context of developing countries. This paper contributes a practical, current example of the relevance of such approaches to assessments of the lives of women in western countries as well. The research findings reported in the paper also cast further light on the importance of several, related themes in the literature on the capabilities approach, namely the importance of understanding how women's aspirations and expectations change with their economic and social experiences; and the importance of appreciating the social uses of language and how this affects the way in which women describe their lives.     

Strategy-Proof Probabilistic Decision Schemes for One-Dimensional Single-Peaked Preferences

Collective decision problems are considered with a finite number of agents who have single-peaked preferences on the real line. A probabilistic decision scheme assigns a probability distribution over the real line to every profile of reported preferences. The main result of the paper is a characterization of the class of unanimous and strategy-proof probabilistic schemes with the aid of fixed probability distributions that play a role similar to that of the phantom voters in H. Moulin (Public Choice35 (1980), 437-455). Thereby, the work of Moulin (1980) is extended to the probabilistic framework. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D71, D81.     

Diffidence Theorem, State-Dependent Preferences, and DARA

C. Gollier (The Economics of Risk and Time. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001) has developed a standard technique based on the diffidence theorem. This theorem provides a very simple instrument to solve relatively sophisticated problems when preferences are state-independent. The object of this article is to show that the theorem is also very useful to derive significant results with state-dependent preferences. Using the reference set notion and an extension of the diffidence theorem, we establish formally necessary and sufficient conditions on the reference set, in order to obtain prudence and decreasing absolute risk aversion. Examples of DARA utility functions compatible with non-linear reference sets are presented in the Appendix.     

A Backward Induction Experiment

This paper reports experiments with one-stage and two-stage alternating-offers bargaining games. Payoff-interdependent preferences have been suggested as an explanation for experimental results that are commonly inconsistent with players' maximizing their monetary payoffs and performing backward induction calculations. We examine whether, given payoff-interdependent preferences, players respect backward induction. To do this, we break backward induction into its components, subgame consistency and truncation consistency. We examine each by comparing the outcomes of two-stage bargaining games with one-stage games with varying rejection payoffs. We find and characterize systematic violations of both subgame and truncation consistency. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C70, C78.