We run in-store blind taste tests with a retailer's private label food brands and the leading national brand counterparts in three large CPG categories. In a survey administered during the taste test, subjects self-report very high expectations about the quality of the private labels relative to...

We study the long-run evolution of brand preferences, using new data on consumers' life histories and purchases of consumer packaged goods. Variation in where consumers have lived in the past allows us to isolate the causal effect of past experiences on current purchases, holding constant...

Brands and brand capital have long been theorized to play an important role in the formation of the industrial market structure of consumer goods industries. We summarize several striking empirical regularities in the concentration, magnitude and persistence of brand market shares in consumer...

This paper studies quality choice in a model where consumers expect firms (or brands) to act altruistically. Under plausible assumptions regarding this altruism and the reaction of consumers to firms that demonstrate insufficient altruism, existing brands can face a larger demand for new...

Disclosure--the practice of providing information to support decision making--has been widely mandated in public policy but is routinely ignored by consumers and subject to obfuscation by firms. Yet most evidence on the effectiveness of consumer financial disclosure stems from lab experiments...