We consider a duopoly in a homogenous goods market where part of the consumers are ex ante uninformed about prices. Information can come through two different channels: advertising and sequential consumer search. We arrive at the following results. First, there is no monotone relationship...

The search literature assumes that consumers know which firms sell products they are looking for, but are unaware of the particular variety and the prices at which each firm sells. In this paper, we consider the situation where consumers are uncertain whether a firm carries the product at all by...

We model the idea that when consumers search for products, they first visit the firm whose advertising is more salient. The gains a firm derives from being visited early increase in search costs, so equilibrium advertising increases as search costs rise. This may result in lower firm profits...

This paper studies the relationship between three key elements of the marketing mix, namely, price, product, and promotion, in a model where a seller employs informative advertising to launch a new product. We propose a fairly general advertising technology for the study of three promotional...

This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to...

This study explored the psychological mechanisms that underlie the retirement planning and saving tendencies of Dutch and American workers. Participants were 988 Dutch and 429 Americans, 25-64 years of age. Analyses were designed to: (a) examine the extent to which structural variables were...

Parents’ transfer motives are important for understanding, e.g., macroeconomics, income (re)distribution, savings, and public finance. Using data from six biennial waves of the Health and Retirement Study 1992–2002, we estimate grouped tobit-type latent variable models with multi-level error...

This paper focuses on the role of habit formation in individual preferences over consumption and saving. We closely relate to Alessie and Lusardi's (1997) model as we estimate a model which is based on their closed-form solution, where saving is expressed as a function of lagged saving and other...

It is well-known that individuals born in different periods of time (cohorts) exhibit different wealth accumulation paths. While previous studies have used cohort dummies to proxy for this fact, research in this area suffers from a serious identification problem, i.e., how to disentangle age,...

We study risk behavior of Danish self-employed entrepreneurs, whose income risk may be driven by both exogenous factors and effort choice (moral hazard). Partial insurance is available through voluntary unemployment insurance (UI). Additional incentives to sign insurance contracts stem from a...