We examine whether the latent behavioral mechanisms embedded in two "price effects" explanations of the obesity problem are operative. Our findings lend support to the hypothesis that falling food price is one likely cause of the obesity epidemic.

We take a structural approach to examine the effects of larger container size on consumption of carbonated soft drinks---using Nielsen Company's Homescan data on household purchases for the years 2004 through 2006. Our results show that by removing the price discount implicit in packages with...

This thesis first considers some extensions of the existing discrete choice models. One such extension is to use the scale mixture of multivariate normal distributions for the random part of the utility in a random utility maximization framework. By doing so, we expand the horizon of discrete...

We propose a general framework for performing full Bayesian analysis under linear inequality parameter constraints. The proposal is motivated by the BioCycle Study, a large cohort study of hormone levels of healthy women where certain well-established linear inequality constraints on the...