Platform goods are commonly seen in practice. They occur when a company offers a durable product (platform) and a consumable product (component). Platform goods are desirable because they create local monopolies and increase the switching cost of products. Platform goods have been extensively...

Utility maximization is implicit in models of consumer choice, learning, forward-looking behavior and substitution. It is a central feature of models of market competition built on the aggregation of individual choices, and is assumed in nearly all quantitative models of behavior. Yet, while the...

Observational data on either individual or aggregate demand is often not sufficient to identify consumer preferences due to lack of variation in prices or product features, or the desire to study product features not currently available. Choice-based conjoint analysis offers a solution to this...

Many economic models of consumer demand require researchers to partition sets of products or attributes prior to the analysis. These models are common in applied problems when the product space is large or spans multiple categories. While the partition is traditionally fixed a priori, we let the...

Consumers often face monetary and non-monetary costs when purchasing goods. Experience goods, for example, require consumers to invest time and money to acquire and use a product, and time requirements may not be fully known prior to making a purchase. Unlike monetary costs, non-monetary costs...