This paper describes two new datasets available to academic researchers. The first is a panel dataset containing the transactions of 19,936 households made over the period from December 1998 to November 2004 at a major U.S. consumer electronics retailer. There are a total of 173,262...

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of differentiated-products demand in an environment with in-store displays and costly consumer price search. This investigation is motivated by two stylized facts on retail markets. First, the prevalence of retail “sales” means that...

Every year many states offer sales tax holidays (STHs) temporarily exempting items like clothes, shoes and school supplies from the state sales tax. We use two data sets, the Diary portion of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and a unique data set of credit cards transactions, to investigate the...

This paper provides a comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of online advertising markets, mostly based on techniques from the emergent discipline of complex systems analysis. First, we look at how the display rank of a URL link influences its click frequency, for both sponsored...

Warehouse club (WC) retailers have typically expanded to new markets using stand-alone stores, rather than pursuing dense store networks as other (non-WC) retailers have in the past. While this strategy generates operating efficiencies, it also imposes high travel costs on households to shop,...

Why do consumers value shopping online? We decompose the value of e-commerce to individual consumers and highlight the role of convenience, i.e., the avoidance of transportation costs. We complement household purchase panel data with precise locations of consumers and stores, and show that...

Although typically overlooked, many purchase datasets exhibit a high incidence of products with zero sales. We propose a new estimator for the Random-Coefficients Logit demand system for purchase datasets with zero-valued market shares. The identification of the demand parameters is based on a...

In retail settings with price promotions, consumers often search across stores and time. However the search literature typically only models one pass search across stores, ignoring revisits to stores; the choice literature using scanner data has modeled search across time, but not search across...

Using bid data from 8,000 new and used Chevrolet Corvettes sold on eBay, this paper empirically tests Akerlof's (1970) hypothesis that the used car market is characterized by low quality and informational problems. The hypothesis states that the used market has a higher proportion of low quality...

We run a large field experiment with an online company specializing in selling used automobiles via ascending auctions. We manipulate experimentally the “price grid,” or the possible amounts that bidders can bid above the current standing price. Using two diverse auction sites, one in New...