Our novel approach to modeling monopolistic competition with heterogeneous consumers involves a space of characteristics of a differentiated good (consumers' ideal points), alike Hotelling (1929). Firms have heterogeneous costs à la Melitz (2003). In addition to price setting, each firm also...

This paper documents the importance of consumer taste in trade flows using Belgian firm-product customs data by destination. We identify consumer taste through the use of a control function approach and estimate it jointly with other demand parameters using a very flexible demand specification....

The widespread use of markets leads to unprecedented material well-being in many societies. We study whether market interaction, as a side effect, erodes moral values. An encompassing understanding of the virtues and vices of markets, including their possible impact on moral values, is necessary...

Is green consumerism beneficial to the environment and the economy? To shed light on this question, we study the political economy of environmental regulations in a model with neutral and green consumers where the latter derive some warm glow from buying a good of higher environmental quality...

This paper experimentally studies the role of associative memory for belief formation. Real-world information signals are often embedded in memorable contexts. Thus, today's news, and the contexts they are embedded in, may cue the selective retrieval of similar past news and hence contribute to...

We study whether and how parents interfere paternalistically in their children’s intertemporal decision-making. Based on experiments with over 2,000 members of 610 families, we find that parents anticipate their children’s present bias and aim to mitigate it. Using a novel method to measure...

We consider the Salop (1979) model of product differentiation and assume that consumers are uncertain about the qualities and prices of firms’ products. They can inspect all products at zero cost. A share of consumers is expectation-based loss averse. For these consumers, a purchase plan,...

We consider a non-durable good monopoly that collects data on its customers in order to profile them and subsequently practice price discrimination on returning customers. The monopolist’s price discrimination scheme is leaky, in the sense that an endogenous fraction of consumers choose to...

Using a Markov-perfect equilibrium model, we show that the use of customer data to practice intertemporal price discrimination will improve monopoly profit if and only if information precision is higher than a certain threshold level. This U-shaped relationship lends support to a popular view...