This paper studies the role of product discovery in the demand for recorded music. We show that releasing a new album causes a substantial and permanent increase in sales of the artist's old albums-especially if the new release is a hit. Patterns in these "backward spillovers" suggest that they...

This paper studies the role of consumer learning in the demand for recorded music by examining the impact of an artist%u2019s new album on sales of past and future albums. Using detailed album sales data for a sample of 355 artists, we show that the release of a new album increases sales of old...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of resale using detailed data on primary and secondary market sales of rock concert tickets. We have detailed sales data from Ticketmaster (the primary market) for several hundred rock concerts from the summer of 2004, and we have matched those data with...

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choices--there is almost no change in purchases of...

We develop an equilibrium model of ticket resale in which buyers' decisions in the primary market, including costly efforts to "arrive early" to buy underpriced tickets, are based on rational expectations of resale market outcomes. We estimate the parameters of the model using a novel dataset...

In principle, a multiproduct firm can set separate prices for all possible bundled combinations of its products (i.e., "mixed bundling"). However, this is impractical for firms with more than a few products, because the number of prices increases exponentially with the number of products. In...

We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers’ purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers’ food choices—there is almost no change in...

We examine pricing strategies for a multiproduct monopolist. We show that simple quantity discounting strategies are almost as profitable as fully optimal bundling. We investigate this in an empirical example, using data from a theater company

We estimate an equilibrium model of ticket resale in which consumers' and brokers' decisions in the primary market reflect rational expectations about the resale market. Estimation is based on a unique dataset that merges transaction details from both the primary and secondary markets for...

We develop a model of herds in which consumers observe only the aggregate purchase history, not the complete ordered history of search actions. We show that the purchasing information changes the conditions under which herds can occur for both low- and high-quality products. Inferior products...