Consumers solve many agency problems, by pointing out when they believe that agents have made mistakes. This paper considers the role that consumers play in inducing efficient behavior by agents. I distinguish between two case: those where consumers have similar preferences to the principal, and...

We study the effects of consumer information on equlibrium market prices and observable product quality in the market for child care. Child care markets offer a unique opportunity to study these effects because of the existence of resource and referral agencies (R&Rs) in some markets. R&Rs...

We estimate the incidence of a relatively new type of excise tax, a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs). We examine the largest such tax to date, which is two cents per ounce, in Boulder, CO. Using data that were hand-collected from stores and restaurants in both Boulder and two control...

This paper studies the impact of the arbitrator selection process on consumer outcomes by examining roughly 9,000 consumer arbitration cases in the securities industry. Securities disputes present a good laboratory: arbitration is mandatory for all disputes, eliminating selection concerns; the...

In this paper, we exploit new sources of cross-sectional data to estimate a detailed product-level demand system for new passenger vehicles. We use four data sources: on the characteristics of products, on the attributes of the U.S. population of households, on the match between the first and...

We show that the welfare of a country's infinitely-lived representative consumer is summarized, to a first order, by total factor productivity (TFP) and by the capital stock per capita. These variables suffice to calculate welfare changes within a country, as well as welfare differences across...

With the continuing expansion of global economic integration, labor standards in developing countries have become a hot button issue. One result has been a proliferation of efforts to use the market to put pressure directly on multinational corporations to improve wages and working conditions in...

The social value of an innovation is comprised of the value to consumers and the value to innovators. We estimate that for the HIV/AIDS therapies that entered the market from the late 1980's onwards, innovators appropriated only 5% of the social surplus arising from these new technologies....

Neoclassical theory postulates that preferences between two goods are independent of the consumer's current entitlements. Several experimental studies have recently provided strong evidence that this basic independence assumption, which is used in most theoretical and applied economic models to...

Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in...