This paper examines how a firm can strategically choose its capacity to manipulate consumer beliefs about aggregate demand. It looks at a market with social effects where consumers want to do what is popular, to buy what they believe others want to buy. By imposing a capacity constraint and...

The widely-used estimator of Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) produces estimates of consumer preferences from a discrete-choice demand model with random coefficients, market-level demand shocks and endogenous prices. We derive numerical theory results characterizing the properties of the nested...

We study the interaction of search and application approval in credit markets. We combine a unique dataset, which details search behavior for a large sample of mortgage borrowers, with loan application and rejection decisions. Our data reveal substantial dispersion in mortgage rates and search...

We test an information theory of prosocial behavior whereby ego utility and self-signaling crowd out the effect of consumption utility on choice. The data come from two field experiments involving purchases of a consumer good bundled with a charitable donation. Across experimental cells, we...

We test a self-signaling theory using two large-scale, randomized controlled field experiments. Smartphone users are randomly sampled to receive promotional offers for movie tickets via SMS technology. Subjects are exposed to different pre-determined levels of price discounts and charitable...

We assess the competitiveness of the $400 billion dollar U.S. bank consumer loan market by comparing results from different competition measures-HHI, Lerner Index, H-Statistic along with three others, two of which are related to frontier analysis. These measures are typically weakly related to...

First, we analyze how regular days off from competition and a time-dependent price pattern affect firm performance. Second, we examine the effects on firms' profitability from consumers' changing search- and timing behavior. We use microdata from gasoline retailing in Norway. Since 2004, firms...

In online social networks, social information, i.e., content generated and shared by users (e.g., past purchases), can be a substitute for sponsored advertising, which constitutes the network's main source of revenue. When will social information be let to spread freely over the platform? We...

While most managers today acknowledge the importance of featuring diverse racial identities in their marketing communications, empirical research that shows how improving such representation may affect consumer behavior is lacking. To fill this gap, we use face recognition and race...

Bayesian consumers infer that hidden add-on prices (e.g. the cost of ink for a printer) are likely to be high prices. If consumers are Bayesian, firms will not shroud information in equilibrium. However, shrouding may occur in an economy with some myopic (or unaware) consumers. Such shrouding...