We investigate the sensitivity of consumer surplus estimates to parametric assumptions on individual preference heterogeneity in a discrete choice framework. We compare results from a parametric random coefficients logit model and a recently proposed nonparametric sieve estimator. In particular,...

The Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) aims at the assessment of people's willingness to pay (WTP) for a public project. The sum of the individual WTPs is interpreted as the social benefits of the project under consideration and compared to the project costs. If the benefits exceed the costs the...

This paper argues that, despite important productivity gains, reforms have benefited consumers much less than expected in El Salvador. Antitrust legislation, consumer protection and an adequate regulation of privatized utilities are central ingredients of a successful market economy. Major...

We examine the implications of pre-grant publication (PP) of patent applications in the context of a cumulative innovation model. We show that pre-grant publication of patents lead to fewer applications and fewer inventions, but it raises the probability that new technologies will reach the...

A government wanting to promote an efficient allocation of resources as measured by the total surplus, should strategically delegate to its competition authority a welfare standard with a bias in favour of consumers. A consumer bias means that some welfare increasing mergers will be blocked....

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists' information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

This paper proposes a framework to model empirically welfare effects that are associated with a price change in a population of heterogeneous consumers. Individual demands are characterized by a nonseparable model which is nonparametric in the regressors, as well as monotonic in unobserved...