In this study, we quantify the effects of receiving stocks from certain brands on spending in the brand's stores. We use data from a new FinTech company called Bumped that opens brokerage accounts for its users and rewards them with stocks when they shop at previously elected stores. For...

This article evaluates two different remedies for consumers who have been injured by a price overcharge on the sale of a good. Under a coupon remedy, injured consumers are awarded coupons that can be used for a limited period of time to purchase the good at a price below that which prevails...

We conduct a large-scale field experiment to study competitive price discrimination in a duopoly market with two rival movie theaters. The firms use mobile targeting to offer different prices based on location and past consumer activity. A novel feature of our experiment is that we test a range...

Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in...

We formulate a test of the fungibility of money based on parallel shifts in the prices of different quality grades of a commodity. We embed the test in a discrete-choice model of product quality choice and estimate the model using panel microdata on gasoline purchases. We find that when gasoline...

I present and solve the problem of a producer who faces costs of acquiring, absorbing, and processing information. I establish a series of theoretical results describing the producer's behavior. First, I find the conditions under which she prefers to set a plan for the price she charges, or...

Asset prices set in a competitive market need not be martingales; that is, it need not be true that the best predictor of future prices is the current price. Nonetheless, statistical tests for this property are sometimes treated as tests for the proper functioning of an asset market; asset...

Digitalization led to a rapid expansion of loyalty tokens typically bundled as part of product price. An open question is whether issuers are incentivized to make loyalty tokens tradable, raising regulation issues for monetary and banking authorities. This paper argues that an issuer earns more...

This article studies optimal remedies in a setting in which damages vary among plaintiffs and are difficult to determine. We show that giving plaintiffs a choice between cash and coupons to purchase units of the defendant's product at a discount -- a "coupon-cash remedy" -- is superior to cash...

Cigarettes are experience goods - most of their utility value only gets revealed when one consumes them. We hypothesize a three phase consumer life cycle for experience goods. Consumers initially do not know their utility from the good or their preferences for particular characteristics, and may...