Random Utitly Models (RUMs) are a particularly convenient way of modelling product differentiation. In this paper we demonstrate that they can be used to examine the possibilities of creating quality measures from data on prices and sales volumes. We formulate conditions sufficient for the...

L’atteggiamento dei consumatori nei confronti di alimenti che contengono OGM o sono ottenuti da OGM e gli alimenti che contengono ingredienti ottenuti da OGM (di seguito designati complessivamente con l’espressione "alimenti geneticamente modificati" o “alimenti GM”) rappresenta un tema...

This paper describes how state-of-the-art methods of choice modeling can be used to analyze consumer choice behavior in "competitive" health insurance markets. I use the insurance choices of senior citizens in the U.S. as an example. I then consider the issue of whether consumers benefit when we...

Recent advances in "simulation based inference" have made it feasible to estimate discrete choice models with several alternatives and rich patterns of consumer taste heterogeneity. These new methods have important potential application in health economics. One important application is the...

We define an intergenerational social welfare function Sigma from |R^|N (the set of all infinite-horizon utility streams) into *|R (the ordered field of hyperreal numbers). The function Sigma is continuous, linear, and increasing, and is well-defined even on unbounded (e.g. exponentially...

This paper shows that there is a positive and statistically significant correlation between the short-term discount rate over a monetary reward and the short-term discount rate over a primary reward (chocolate). This correlation, however, is absent among subjects who do not like chocolate and...

Prior studies have found that subjects prefer an improving sequence of income over a constant sequence, even if the constant sequence offers a larger present discounted value. However, little is known about how these preferences vary with the size of the wage payments. In each of our three...

The primary manifestation of the demographic transition in a modern economic context is through ageing and the primary transmission from ageing to the macro economy is through its effect on saving and investment behavior. These two effects taken together suggest a strong impact from the...

This paper experimentally studies the effects of background music and sound on the preference of the decision makers for rewards in pairwise intertemporal choice tasks and lottery choice tasks. The participants took part in the current experiment, involving four treatments: (1) the familiar...

Let X be a set of states, and let I be an infinite indexing set. Our first main result states that any separable, permutation-invariant preference order () on X^I admits an additive representation. That is: there exists a linearly ordered abelian group A and a `utility function' u:X--A such...