Knowledge that Transforms

According to household production theory, consumers buy inputs and combine them to produce final goods from which they derive utility. We use this idea to build a micro-level model for the quantity demanded by a consumer across product categories. Our model proposes an intuitive explanation for the existence of negative cross-price effects across categories and can be estimated on purchase data in the presence of corner solutions and indivisible packages. We find that, even when reusing the same functional form as some previous models of demand for substitutes, our model can accommodate very different patterns of consumer preferences from perfect complementarity to no complementarity between goods. We estimate the model on purchase data from a panel of consumers and find that it yields a better fit than a set of benchmark models. We then show how the demand system estimated can be used to increase the profitability of couponing strategies by taking into account the spillover effect of coupons on demand for complementary categories and by manufacturers to make decisions regarding the size of packages by taking into account cross-category consumption. We also use the model to simulate demand under a shift in the proportions used in joint consumption, which could be stimulated via marketing efforts.

This study jointly examines the heterogeneous effects of television advertising and field operations in U.S. presidential elections.

We investigate the role of heterogeneous peer effects in encouraging healthy lifestyles. Our analysis revolves around one of the largest and most extensive databases about weight loss that track individual participants’ meeting attendance and progress in a large national weight loss program. The main finding is that, although weight loss among average-performing peers has a negative effect on an individual’s weight loss, the corresponding effect for the top performer among peers is positive. Furthermore, we show that our results are robust to potential issues related to selection into meetings, endogenous peer outcomes, individual unobserved heterogeneity, lagged dependent variables, and contextual effects. Ultimately, these results provide guidance about how the weight loss program should identify role models.

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.

This article provides a novel method to optimize the profits of proactive retention campaigns using a machine learning approach to causal inference.

A new approach for measuring consumer brand perceptions from consumer-created brand imagery via deep learning.

We investigate whether online travel agents (OTAs) assign hotels worse positions in their search results if these set lower hotel prices elsewhere.

This paper shows the existence of a net market expansion effect of news aggregators through which news outlets increase their number of visits.

We develop a topic model with multiple latent changepoints and demonstrate an approach to detect changes in the topics mentioned in brand-related social media posts.

This paper studies consumers’ revealed privacy choice in online display advertising using real-world transaction data from an ad exchange.