We compare the private and social incentives for privacy when sellers can commit to transparent privacy policies that are understood by consumers. The purpose is to establish a baseline for how well markets perform when firms' privacy policies are common knowledge. In this setting, if the market...

Prior to the invention of the Internet, shopping for goods was relatively simple: a consumer visited a brick-and-mortal retailer and selected a product from what was available or, for some retailers, shopped using a catalog. Today, a simple Internet search may return a bewildering number of...

This paper investigates price differences between online and offline retail channels in the EU Digital Single Market. Using price and sales data for ten household appliances product categories sold both offline and online in 21 EU countries in 2009, and correcting for product characteristics, we...

Digital goods generate a large amount of consumer welfare but these welfare gains are not properly measured in existing macroeconomic measures. This chapter summarizes existing research on measuring consumer welfare from digital goods. Recent research suggests that massive online choice...

We develop and estimate a model of consumer search with spatial learning. Consumers make inferences from previously searched objects to unsearched objects that are nearby in attribute space, generating path dependence in search sequences. The estimated model rationalizes patterns in data on...

This paper discusses the impacts of providing energy efficiency information to online shoppers. It lays out mechanisms by which this may improve appliance purchase and use decisions, raise awareness, improve innovation and align market forces with sustainability objectives. It finds that...