We empirically examine the redistributive effects of higher minimum quality standards on consumer welfare. More specifically, we study the impact of the European Union's ban on battery eggs, the previous minimum quality standard, on household egg purchases and evaluate its redistributive effect on consumer welfare.
This article investigates consumer protection on Kickstarter; it shows that broken price advertising claims pose a substantial, persistent, and unresolved problem.
To study consumer brand misinformation, we run in-store blind taste tests with a retailer’s private label food brands and the leading national brand counterparts in three large consumer packaged goods categories. Subjects self-report very high expectations about the quality of the private labels relative to national brands. However, they predict a relatively low probability of choosing them in a blind taste test. An overwhelming majority systematically choose the private label in the blinded test. Using program evaluation methods, we find that the causal effect of this intervention on treated consumers increases their market share for the tested private label product by 15 share points during the week after the intervention, on top of a base share of 8 share points. However, the effect diminishes to 8 share points during the second to fourth weeks after the test and to 2 share points during the second to fifth months after the test. Using a structural model of demand that controls for the self-selected participation and allows for heterogeneous treatment effects, we show that these effects survive controls for point-of-purchase prices, purchase incidence, and the feedback effects of brand loyalty. We also find that the intervention increases the preference for the private label brands, and that it decreases the preference for the national brands, relative to the outside good. Interpreting the intervention as an information treatment about the product, we find evidence consistent with an economically large informational barrier on demand for the private label product relative to an established national brand.
This article investigates how firms compete when they have the ability to set a personalized price to those consumers they can profile and a uniform price to those consumers they cannot profile; how this affects the incentives to supply data analytics to firms; and what, if any, policy recommendations can be provided.
We collaborated with a large online social network to conduct a randomized field experiment measuring social ad effectiveness across 71 products in 25 categories among more than 37 million users.
This paper is an empirical case study of fundraising decisions that examines the adequacy of various sources of guidance and demonstrates the unique importance of in-context field experiments.