We study the impact of mandatory calorie posting on consumers' purchase decisions, using detailed data from Starbucks. We find that average calories per transaction falls by 6%. The effect is almost entirely related to changes in consumers' food choices--there is almost no change in purchases of...

We develop an equilibrium model of ticket resale in which buyers' decisions in the primary market, including costly efforts to "arrive early" to buy underpriced tickets, are based on rational expectations of resale market outcomes. We estimate the parameters of the model using a novel dataset...

In principle, a multiproduct firm can set separate prices for all possible bundled combinations of its products (i.e., quot;mixed bundlingquot;). However, this is impractical for firms with more than a few products, because the number of prices increases exponentially with the number of...

In 2011, Maricopa County adopted voluntary restaurant hygiene grade cards (A, B, C, D). Using inspections results between 2007 and 2013, we show that only 58 percent of the subsequent inspections led to online grade posting. Although the disclosure rate in general declines with inspection...

The French Opposition to the war in Iraq in early 2003, prompted calls for a boycott of French wine in the US. We measure the magnitude of consumers%u2019 participation in the boycott, and look at basic evidence of who participates. Conservative estimates indicate that the boycott resulted in...

We analyze the differences between companies owned by private equity (PE) investors and similar public companies. We document that PE-owned companies use much stronger incentives for their top executives and have substantially higher debt levels. However, we find little evidence that PE-owned...

Economic theory suggests that decentralized markets can achieve efficient outcomes if buyers and sellers have many opportunities to trade. We examine this idea empirically by developing a tractable dynamic model of bidding in an overlapping, sequential auction environment and estimating the...

This paper studies the role of consumer learning in the demand for recorded music by examining the impact of an artist%u2019s new album on sales of past and future albums. Using detailed album sales data for a sample of 355 artists, we show that the release of a new album increases sales of old...

We use data on the enrollment decisions of federal annuitants to estimate the influence of publicizedratings on health plan choice. We focus on the impact of ratings disseminated by the NationalCommittee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), and use our estimates to calculate the value of...

This paper uses detailed data on retail pharmacy transactions to make inferences about the nature and intensity of consumer search for prescription drugs. Prescription prices exhibit patterns that should, in principle, induce search: in particular, prices vary widely across stores, and stores'...