Microeconometric Models of Infrequently Purchased Goods: An Application to Household Pork Consumption.

The double-hurdle and infrequency-of-purchase models are generalized with the inverse hyperbolic sine transformation in the dependent variable. The resulting specifications feature more flexible parameterization and error distributions than the untransformed models. Using the 1987-88 Nationwide Food Consumption Survey data on household pork consumption, a non-nested test suggests that the IHS double-hurdle model provides better characterization of the data-generating process than the IHS infrequency-of-purchase model but the elasticities derived from these models are similar. Own-price effects on the probability and level of consumption are negative and significant but the elasticities are small. Income and cross-price effects are not significant. Household age composition, education, gender of meal planner, and race are among the demographic variables that affect consumption.