The rise of social media has provoked both optimism about potential societal benefits and concern about harms such as addiction, depression, and political polarization. We present a randomized evaluation of the welfare effects of Facebook, focusing on US users in the run-up to the 2018 midterm...

We analyze competition between data intermediaries collecting information on consumers, which they sell to firms for price discrimination purposes. We show that competition between data intermediaries benefits consumers by increasing competition between firms, and by reducing the amount of...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone is enough to ensure that consumer surplus is always reduced by a price control in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or when demand is...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone is enough to ensure that consumer surplus is always reduced by a price control in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or when demand is...

This paper seeks to understand the impact of the Medicare Rural Hospital Flexi- bility (Flex) Program on rural resident hospital choice and welfare. The Flex program created a new class of hospital, the Critical Access Hospital (CAH), which receives more generous reimbursement in return for...

The objective of this paper is to analyse the welfare effects of food price volatility on Cameroonian consumers. Using data from the third Cameroonian Household Consumption Surveys, the price elasticities are obtained from a Quadratic Almost Ideal Demand System model. Price elasticities are then...

In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that...

In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that...

This paper investigates the consumer welfare consequences of the recent code-share agreement between Continental Airlines and Northwest Airlines. We develop a discrete choice model based on individual flight characteristics. This structural model recognizes that consumers i) may have...