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...

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...

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 paper presents a unified theory of human capital with both health capital and, what we term, skill capital endogenously determined within the model. By considering joint investment in health capital and in skill capital, the model highlights similarities and differences in these two...

This discussion paper led to a publication in <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jae.1071/full"><I>Journal of Applied Econometrics</I></A>, 24(6), 993-1023.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...</i></a>

Many empirical studies on intertemporal choice report preference reversals in the sense that a preference between a small reward to be received soon and a larger reward to be received later reverses as both rewards are equally delayed. Such preference reversals are commonly interpreted as...

This study analyses the relation between perceived health status and intertemporal choice. We use data from experiments with real monetary rewards conduEted among students in South Africa to estimate risk and time preferences. These experimental data, based on muitiple price lists developed by...