Current neoclassical microeconomic theory of rational consumer behavior affirms a unique consumer price-quantity relationship under conditions associated with monopolistic competition. Inverse demand will be just as own-price elastic as demand in the neighborhood of the limit state, while demand...

Revisions incorporated into the Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010 claim that the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission consider anticompetitive effects to product “variety” when evaluating mergers. The Guidelines do not, however, explain the methodology or tools that can...

The idea that consumers are rational decision makers, who carefully consider options when making a decision about a certain phenomenon, will soon phase out! Believe it or not. In a bid to better understand the consumer, a myriad of economists still waste their precious time on “not-so-deep”...

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...

In this paper we explore the underlying consumer heterogeneity in competitive markets for subscription-based IT services that exhibit network effects. Insights into consumer heterogeneity with respect to a given service are paramount in forecasting future subscriptions, understanding the impact...

We extend the swaps index of rationality, introduced by Apesteguia and Ballester (2015) for a finite set of alternatives, to the standard consumer choice setting with infinite commodity spaces. Applications include consumer demand from competitive budget sets and the state-space approach to...

We establish the Hurwicz-Uzawa integrability of the broad class of discrete-choice additive random-utility models of individual consumer behavior with perfect substitutes preferences and divisible goods. We derive the corresponding indirect uility function and then establish a representative...

The objective of this note is to revisit the meaningfulness of the Condorcet Jury Theorem (CJT) and apply it to the recent debate on liberal paternalism and consumer protection. The CJT con-sists of two parts, (a) stating that a jury of experts is always more competent than a single expert given...

This paper shows that the possibility of formally incorporating reference-dependence into the theory of consumer behavior was explored well before Kahneman and Tversky (1991); specifically, in separate papers by Alt, Samuelson or Bernardelli in late 1930s. These papers emerged within a debate on...

Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...