Salient social comparisons to peers are generally thought to increase people's productive effort. But social comparisons can also become ends in themselves, with individuals seeking to outrank others by costly, non-productive means. This paper explores the motives behind such tendencies in the...

Salient social comparisons to peers are generally thought to increase people's productive effort. But social comparisons can also become ends in themselves, with individuals seeking to outrank others by costly, non-productive means. This paper explores the motives behind such tendencies in the...

The theoretical literature of industrial organization shows that the distances between consumers and firms have first-order implications for competitive outcomes whenever transportation costs are large. To assess these effects empirically, we develop a structural model of competition among...

We develop an estimator for models of competition among spatially differentiated firms. In contrast to existing methods (e.g., Houde (2009)), the estimator has flexible data requirements and is implementable with data that are observed at any level of aggregation. Further, the estimator is the...