A consumer wants to buy one of three different products. An expert observes which of the three products is the best match for the consumer. Under linear prices a monopolistic expert may truthfully reveal, may partially reveal, and may not reveal at all her information. The outcome is...

Today a new generation of food safety policy is emerging in OECD countries and international public health forums. The United States has actively contributed to the thinking and scientific research underlying this new generation of policy. A consensus has emerged among nations about the basic...

This paper generalizes the price discrimination framework of Mussa and Rosen (1978) by considering salience-driven consumer preferences in the sense of Bordalo et al. (2013b). Consumers with salience-driven preferences give a higher weight to attributes that vary more. This reduces the...

This paper develops a new framework for empirical modelling of consumer demand with particular reference to products that are differentiated with respect to quality and location attributes. The point of departure is a flexible representation of the distribution of product attributes and consumer...

In this paper we discuss statistical inference associated with the theoretical model developed in Part I. Specifically, we demonstrate how the relationship between the distribution of prices and unit values can be exploited to estimate some of the structural parameters. These estimates are...

In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer, judging matters from society's point of view. It is not clear which of these possibly conflicting roles respondents in contingent valuation studies take on. This leads...

This paper discusses the problem of specifying probabilistic models for choices (strategies) with uncertain outcomes. The point of departure is an extension of the axiom system of the von Neumann-Morgenstern Expected utility theory to the case when the preferences are stochastic. This extended...

Economic models typically assume that individual wants are determined by forces exogenous to the economic system. Social psychology and consumer research, in contrast, support the view that the perceived benefits of consumption are strongly affected by endogenously determined social norms. This...

Hirsch (1976) suggested that as consumption grows, an increasing proportion of the benefits people derive from consumption is due to a status effect. Status is a relative concept that cannot be increased on average; thus it may seem reasonable to expect that as consumption grows, the marginal...

The formation of peer groups with social norms for private contributions to a public good is analyzed in an n-player two stage game. First people choose a peer group, then they choose whether to contribute. The first choice is made through a learning process represented by evolutionary dynamics,...