Standardization of complex products is touted as improving consumer decisions and intensifying price competition, but evidence on standardization is limited. We examine a natural experiment: the standardization of health insurance plans on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange....

Dynamic defaults for recurring purchases determine what happens to consumers enrolled in a product or service who take no action at a decision point. Consumers may face automatic renewal, automatic switching, or non-purchase defaults. Privately optimal dynamic defaults depend on the...

We propose a method for aggregating prices when retailers use periodic sales to price-discriminate amongst heterogeneous customers. To do so, we introduce a model in which Loyal customers buy one brand and do not strategically time purchases, while Bargain Hunters always pay the lowest price...

We examine the effect of consumer reviews on relative sales of books on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. We find that 1) reviews are overwhelmingly positive at both sites, but there are more reviews and longer reviews at Amazon.com, 2) an improvement in a book's reviews leads to an increase in...

Popular wisdom holds that publishers revise college textbooks mainly to kill off the secondary market for used books. While this behavior might be profitable if consumers are myopic, uninformed or have high short-run discount rates (that exceed the publishers'), neoclassical authors have noted...

We measure provider coverage networks for plans on the Massachusetts health insurance exchange using a two measures: consumer surplus from a hospital demand system and the fraction of population hospital admissions that would be covered by the network. The two measures are highly correlated, and...