While much economic policy presumes that more information infrastructure yields higher economic returns, little empirical work measures the magnitudes of these returns. We examine investment by local exchange telephone companies in fiber optic cable, ISDN lines and signal seven software,...

We propose a new classification of consumption goods into nondurable goods, durable goods and a new class which we call "memorable" goods. A good is memorable if a consumer can draw current utility from its past consumption experience through memory. We propose a novel consumption-savings model...

Although fake online customer reviews have become prevalent on platforms such as Amazon, Google, and Facebook, little is known about how these reviews influence consumer behavior. This paper provides the first experimental estimates of the effects of fake reviews on individual demand and...

We compare the behavior and welfare effects of two popular interventions for resource conservation. The first intervention is social comparison reports (SC), which primarily provide consumers with information motivating behavioral change. The second intervention is real-time feedback (RTF),...

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...

Regulators are responding to growing platform power with curbs on platforms' potentially biased exercise of power, creating urgent needs for both a workable definition of platform bias and ways to detect and measure it. We develop a simple equilibrium framework in which consumers choose among...

This paper measures the impact of nonassumable, fixed-rate, long-term mortgage financing on household mobility and housing demand during a period of accelerating inflation (l965_71l). We calculate that typical households who bought houses during the l96l7l period and utilized this type of...

We propose new methods to model behavior and conduct welfare analysis in complex environments where some choices are unlikely to reveal preferences. We develop a mixture-of-experts model that incorporates heterogeneity in consumers' preferences and in their choice processes. We also develop a...

Consumers often face an overwhelming amount of information when deciding between products, and one of the primary policymaking tools available to improve their informativeness is the framing of this information. We introduce a general theoretical approach that characterizes when one frame is...

We show that personal experiences of economic shocks can "scar'" consumer behavior in the long run. We first illustrate the effects of experience-based learning in a simple stochastic life-cycle consumption model with time-varying financial constraints. We then use data from the Panel Study of...