online. For such goods, estimating price elasticities with expenditure data can be difficult, and, therefore, estimated welfare gains highly uncertain. We show that for time-intensive goods like the Internet, a simple model in which both expenditure and time contribute to consumption can be used...

Market provision of impure public goods such as insurance retirement savings and education is common and growing as policy makers seek to offer more choice and gain efficiencies. This approach induces an important trade-off between improved surplus from matching individuals to products and...

Subsidies to consumers may cause firms to charge higher prices, which offsets consumer benefits from subsidies. We study a subsidy program design that mitigates such price increases by making products' eligibility for a subsidy dependent on firms' commitment to price ceilings. To quantify the...

We present both theory and evidence that increased competition may decrease rather than increase consumer welfare in subprime credit markets. We present a model of lending markets with imperfect competition, adverse selection and costly lender screening. In more competitive markets, lenders have...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) prediction of demand by a monopolist firm is examined. It is shown that, in the absence of AI prediction, firms face complex trade-offs in setting price and quantity ahead of demand that impact on the returns of AI adoption. Different industrial...

The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. In a randomized experiment, we find that deactivating Facebook for the four weeks before the 2018 US midterm election (i)...

E-Commerce represents a rapidly growing share of consumer spending in the U.S. We use transactions-level data on credit and debit cards from Visa, Inc. between 2007 and 2017 to quantify the resulting consumer surplus. We estimate that E-Commerce spending reached 8% of consumption by 2017,...

This paper uses the Euler equation and novel data from Berea College students on their consumption expenditures during and after college, desired borrowing amounts, beliefs about post-college earnings, and elicited risk-aversion and time preference parameters to determine their consumption value...

The information revolution currently underway has changed the economy in ways that are hard to measure using conventional GDP procedures. The information available to consumers has increased dramatically as a result of the Internet and its applications, and new mobile communication devices have...

A concern central to the economics of privacy is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common response is that consumers should have control over their data and the ability to choose how firms access it. Since firms draw inferences based on both the data seen as well as the...