We study the estimation of preference heterogeneity in markets where consumers engage in costly search to learn product characteristics. Costly search amplifies the way consumer preferences translate into purchase probabilities, generating a seemingly large degree of preference heterogeneity. We...

Traditional methods for estimating demand are not always well-suited to online markets, where individual products are sold infrequently, unobserved factors such as webpage layout drive substitution, and often only a limited set of product characteristics is observed. We propose a demand model...

We leverage a temporary block of the Chinese microblogging platform Sina Weibo due to political events, to estimate the causal effect of online word-of-mouth content on product demand in the context of TV show viewership. Based on this source of exogenous variation, we estimate an elasticity of...