What makes you click?—Mate preferences in online dating

We estimate mate preferences using a novel data set from an online dating service. The data set contains detailed information on user attributes and the decision to contact a potential mate after viewing his or her profile. This decision provides the basis for our preference estimation approach. A potential problem arises if the site users strategically shade their true preferences. We provide a simple test and a bias correction method for strategic behavior. The main findings are (i) There is no evidence for strategic behavior. (ii) Men and women have a strong preference for similarity along many (but not all) attributes. (iii) In particular, the site users display strong same-race preferences. Race preferences do not differ across users with different age, income, or education levels in the case of women, and differ only slightly in the case of men. For men, but not for women, the revealed same-race preferences correspond to the same-race preference stated in the users’ profile. (iv) There are gender differences in mate preferences; in particular, women have a stronger preference than men for income over physical attributes.     

Prices and promotions in U.S. retail markets

We provide generalizable results on the price and promotion tactics employed in the U.S. retail grocery industry. First, we document a large degree of price dispersion for UPCs and brands across stores, both nationally and at the local market level. Base price differences across stores and price promotions contribute to the overall price variance, and we show how to decompose the price variance into base price and promotion components. Second, we document that a large percentage of the variation in prices and promotion tactics across stores can be explained by retail chain and especially market/chain factors, whereas market factors explain only smaller percentage of the variation. Third, we show that the chain-level price and promotions similarity can be explained by similarity in demand. In particular, a large percentage of the variance in price elasticities and promotion effects can be explained by retail chain and especially market/retail chain factors. Further, price elasticities and promotion effects across stores of the same chain are hard to distinguish from the chain-market-level mean, and cross-price elasticities are typically imprecisely estimated. These findings suggest that retail managers may plausibly consider price discrimination across stores to be infeasible.

     

The Joint identification of utility and discount functions from stated choice data: An application to durable goods adoption

We present a survey design that generalizes static conjoint experiments to elicit inter-temporal adoption decisions for durable goods. We show that consumers’ utility and discount functions in a dynamic discrete choice model are jointly identified using data generated by this specific design. In contrast, based on revealed preference data, the utility and discount functions are generally not jointly identified even if consumers’ expectations are known. The separation of current-period preferences from discounting is necessary to forecast the diffusion of a durable good under alternative marketing strategies. We illustrate the approach using two surveys eliciting Blu-ray player adoption decisions. Both model-free evidence and the estimates based on a dynamic discrete choice model indicate that consumers make forward-looking adoption decisions. In both surveys the average discount rate is 43 percent, corresponding to a substantially higher degree of impatience than the rate implied by aggregate asset returns. The estimates also reveal a large degree of heterogeneity in the discount rates across consumers, but only little evidence for hyperbolic discounting.     

Recent Advances in Structural Econometric Modeling: Dynamics, Product Positioning and Entry

In the empirical analysis of consumer markets, recent literature has begun to explore the dynamics in both consumer decisions as well as in firms' marketing policies. Other research has begun to explore the strategic aspects of product line design in a competitive environment. In both cases, structural models have given us new insights into consumer and firm behavior. For example, incorporating consumer and firm dynamics may help explain patterns in our data that are not well-captured by static models. Similarly, the strategic aspects of firm entry and product-positioning may be intrinsically linked to firm conduct and the intensity of competition in a market. Structural analysis of these consumer and firm decisions raise a number of substantial computational challenges. We discuss the computational challenges as well as specific empirical applications. The discussions are based on the session “Structural Models of Strategic Choice” from the 2004 Choice Symposium.     

State dependence and alternative explanations for consumer inertia

For many consumer packaged goods products, researchers have documented inertia in brand choice, a form of persistence whereby consumers have a higher probability of choosing a product that they have purchased in the past. We show that the finding of inertia is robust to flexible controls for preference heterogeneity and not due to autocorrelated taste shocks. We explore three economic explanations for the observed structural state dependence: preference changes due to past purchases or consumption experiences which induce a form of loyalty, search, and learning. Our data are consistent with loyalty, but not with search or learning. This distinction is important for policy analysis, because the alternative sources of inertia imply qualitative differences in firm's pricing incentives and lead to quantitatively different equilibrium pricing outcomes.     

Measuring long-run marketing effects and their implications for long-run marketing decisions

This paper discusses the role of agents’ beliefs and their implications for the economic modeling of their behavior, in particular, their behavior over time. The paper also discusses the corresponding planning problems facing both firms and consumers in their current decision making. After a general discussion of the consumer and firm problem, we discuss recent examples of some of the emerging empirical literature on dynamic choice behavior in marketing.     

An Empirical Model of Advertising Dynamics

This paper develops a model of dynamic advertising competition, and applies it to the problem of optimal advertising scheduling through time. In many industries we observe advertising “pulsing”, whereby firms systematically switch advertising on and off at a high-frequency. Hence, we observe periods of zero and non-zero advertising, as opposed to a steady level of positive advertising. Previous research has rationalized pulsing through two features of the sale response function: an S-shaped response to advertising, and long-run effects of current advertising on demand. Despite considerable evidence for advertising carry-over, existing evidence for non-convexities in the shape of the sales-response to advertising has been limited and, often, mixed. We show how both features can be included in a discrete choice based demand system and estimated using a simple partial maximum likelihood estimator. The demand estimates are then taken to the supply side, where we simulate the outcome of a dynamic game using the Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) concept. Our objective is not to test for the specific game generating observed advertising levels. Rather, we wish to verify whether the use of pulsing (on and off) can be justified as an equilibrium advertising practice. We solve for the equilibrium using numerical dynamic programming methods. The flexibility provided by the numerical solution method allows us to improve on the existing literature, which typically considers only two competitors, and places strong restrictions on the demand models for which the supply side policies can be obtained. We estimate the demand model using data from the Frozen Entree product category. We find evidence for a threshold effect, which is qualitatively similar to the aforementioned S-shaped advertising response. We also show that the threshold is robust to functional form assumptions for the marginal impact of advertising on demand. Our estimates, which are obtained without imposing any supply side restrictions, imply that firms should indeed pulse in equilibrium. Predicted advertising in the MPE is higher, on average, than observed advertising. On average, the optimal advertising policies yield a moderate profit improvement over the profits under observed advertising.JEL Classification: L11, L66, M30 M37 R12