Transaction costs impose a barrier to savings, but lowering them may have smaller impacts than expected due to other constraints, such as psychological biases. Within the context of retirement savings under defined contributions in the privatized pension system in Mexico, we analyze two...

Does advertising help consumers to find the products they need or push them to buy products they don't need? In this paper, we study the effects of advertising on consumer mistakes and quantify the resulting effect on consumer welfare in the market for mortgage refinancing. Mortgage borrowers...

The welfare implications of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) have garnered considerable attention and are complicated since the consumer delegates some decision-making authority to the physician, who is exposed to advertising as well. In this paper, I develop and estimate a structural model...

We investigate how location-based services (LBS) influence consumers' choice behavior in the mobile Internet. LBS are able to make use of the users' location by the means of GPS-enabled smartphones. Further, the ubiquitous nature of smartphones increases the importance of additional contextual...

Many countries regulate the quality of food and drugs, yet it remains unclear whether markets can be relied upon to deliver high quality in the absence of regulation, notably where companies can advertise the superior quality of their products. We present evidence from two field experiments in...

The main aim of this study is to investigate the association of guerrilla marketing on consumer buying behavior. Guerrilla advertising is one of the growing marketing techniques which are used by advertising industry that makes a use of unusual or unconventional means of promoting the product to...

This paper examines the impact of exposure to foreign media on the economic behavior of agents in a totalitarian regime. We study private consumption choices focusing on former East Germany, where differential access to Western television was determined by geographic features. Using data...