Consumer welfare
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Influence of consumer reviews on online purchasing decisions in older and younger adults Open
We investigated how product attributes, average consumer ratings, and single affect-rich positive or negative consumer reviews influenced hypothetical online purchasing decisions of younger and older adults. In line with previous research,…
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Search Frictions and Market Power in Negotiated-Price Markets Open
We provide a framework for empirical analysis of negotiated-price markets. Using mortgage market data and a search and negotiation model, we characterize the welfare impact of search frictions and quantify the role of search costs and bran…
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Innovation and competition: The role of the product market Open
We study how competition impacts innovation (and welfare) when firms compete both in the product market and in innovation development. This relationship is complex and may lead to scenarios in which a lessening of competition increases R&D…
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Equilibrium Effects of Food Labeling Policies Open
We study a regulation in Chile that mandates warning labels on products whose sugar or caloric concentration exceeds certain thresholds. We show that consumers substitute from labeled to unlabeled products—a pattern mostly driven by produc…
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The Problem of Bigness: From Standard Oil to Google Open
This article sets recent expressions of alarm about the monopoly power of technology giants such as Google and Amazon in the long history of Americans’ response to big business. I argue that we cannot understand that history unless we real…
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How EU Markets Became More Competitive Than US Markets: A Study of Institutional Drift Open
Until the 1990's, US markets were more competitive than European markets. Today, European markets have lower concentration, lower excess profits and lower regulatory barriers to entry. We document this surprising outcome and propose an exp…
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Consumer information and the limits to competition Open
This paper studies competition between firms when consumers observe a pri-vate signal of their preferences over products. Within the class of signal structures which allow pure-strategy pricing equilibria, we derive signal structures which…
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Personalized Pricing and Consumer Welfare Open
We study the welfare implications of personalized pricing, an extreme form of third-degree price discrimination implemented with machine learning for a large, digital firm.Using data from a unique randomized controlled pricing field experi…
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Choice Complexity and Market Competition Open
Consumers often find it hard to make correct value comparisons between market alternatives. Part of this choice complexity is the result of deliberate obfuscation by firms. This review synthesizes a theoretical literature that analyzes the…
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Rethinking European Competition Law: From a Consumer Welfare to a Capability Approach Open
European competition law is predominantly focused on maximizing consumer welfare. This overarching purpose (which is supported by economic theory) leaves little place for safeguarding non-economic values, such as sustainability. This makes…
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The Impact of E-Commerce on Relative Prices and Consumer Welfare Open
This paper examines the impact of e-commerce on pricing behavior and welfare.Using Japanese data, we find that the entry of e-commerce firms significantly raised the rate of intercity price convergence for goods sold intensively online, bu…
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The Welfare Consequences of Mergers with Endogenous Product Choice Open
Merger simulations focus on the price changes that result once previously independent competitors set prices jointly and other market participants respond. We consider the incentives for firms to adjust the set of offered products after a …
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Persuasion Through Selective Disclosure: Implications for Marketing, Campaigning, and Privacy Regulation Open
This paper models how firms or political campaigners (senders) persuade consumers and voters (receivers) by selectively disclosing information about their offering depending on individual receivers' preferences and orientations. We derive …
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The Impact of Trade Agreements on Consumer Welfare—Evidence from the EU Common External Trade Policy Open
This paper estimates the consumer welfare impact of the new generation of trade agreements implemented by the European Union between 1993 and 2013. We decompose the overall effect into contributions of changes in prices, quality and variet…
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Food fraud: economic insights into the dark side of incentives Open
In this review, we contextualise the articles in this special issue, relating them to existing food fraud research, and identify food fraud research trends, challenges and priorities for the near term. We accomplish these aims through a co…
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Quality Overprovision in Cable Television Markets Open
We measure the welfare distortions from endogenous quality choice in imperfectly competitive markets. For US cable television markets between 1997–2006, prices are 33 percent to 74 percent higher and qualities 23 percent to 55 percent high…
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Targeted advertising, platform competition, and privacy Open
Targeted advertising can benefit consumers through lower prices for access to web sites. Yet, if consumers dislike that web sites collect their personal information, their welfare may go down. We study competition for consumers between web…
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Add-on Pricing in Retail Financial Markets and the Fallacies of Consumer Education Open
We analyze the consequences of consumer education on prices and welfare in retail financial markets when some consumers are naive about shrouded add-on prices and banks try to exploit this. Allowing for different information and pricing st…
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Privileging Consolidation and Proscribing Cooperation: The Perversity of Contemporary Antitrust Law Open
Democratic and Republican administrations and the Supreme Court, in implementing antitrust law as “a consumer welfare prescription” over the past 40 years, reached a consensus on two important issues. First, antitrust enforcers and courts …
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A Theory of Multitier Ecolabel Competition Open
Ecolabels are widely used to inform markets about credence attributes of products. We present the first analysis of ecolabel competition that allows labels to have multiple tiers (e.g., silver/gold/platinum). For either an industry associa…
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Data Sharing and Market Power with Two-Sided Platforms Open
We study an economy in which consumers and merchants (sellers) interact on a two-sided platform.Consumers can share data about their tastes for different varieties of a single good with the platform which in turn sells this data to merchan…
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Making Consumer Finance Work Open
The financial crisis exposed major faultlines in banking and financial markets more broadly. Policymakers responded with far-reaching regulation that created a new agency—the CFPB—and changed the structure and function of these markets.\nC…
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Hybrid Marketplaces with Free Entry of Sellers Open
We study a hybrid marketplace such as Amazon that sells its own products and sets commissions on third-party sellers that engage in monopolistic competition with free entry. For a large class of microfoundations based on a representative a…
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Attention Platforms, the Value of Content, and Public Policy Open
This paper shows that two related aspects of attention platforms are important for the sound economic analysis of public policy including antitrust: first, attention platforms generate valuable content. Even though people often don’t pay f…
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Growing Oligopolies, Prices, Output, and Productivity Open
American industries have grown more concentrated over the last 40 years. In the absence of productivity innovation, this should lead to price hikes and output reductions, decreasing consumer welfare. With US census data from 1972 to 2012, …
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Consumer behavior and food prices during the COVID‐19 pandemic: Evidence from Chinese cities Open
We find that Chinese consumers responded strongly to government restrictions during the COVID‐19 crisis. Our event‐study framework shows that emergency declarations raised average food prices by as much as 7.8 standard deviations of the pr…
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Electronic transmissions and international trade - shedding new light on the moratorium debate Open
The debate about whether or not to extend the WTO Moratorium on imposing customs duties on electronic transmissions has, to date, narrowly focused on its potential customs revenue implications. This paper sets out to broaden and deepen thi…
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Low oil prices: an opportunity for fuel subsidy reform Open
Consumer fuel subsidies are not only economically costly, but also environmentally destructive and highly inefficient for social welfare goals. The recent decline in oil prices presents an opportunity for governments to reduce consumer fue…
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After Consumer Welfare, Now What? The "Protection of Competition" Standard in Practice Open
The consumer welfare standard in antitrust has been heavily criticized. But would, in fact, abandoning the “consumer welfare” standard make the antitrust law too unworkable and indeterminate?\nI argue that there is such a thing as a post-c…
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Higher Minimum Quality Standards and Redistributive Effects on Consumer Welfare Open
We empirically examine the redistributive effects of higher minimum quality standards on consumer welfare. More specifically, we study the impact of the European Union's ban on battery eggs, the previous minimum quality standard, on househ…