Consumer Behavior

A climate economist overhauls his leaky, 200-year-old co-op.

Product personalization opens the door to price discrimination. A rich product line allows for higher consumer satisfaction, but the mere choice of a product carries valuable information about the consumer that the firm can leverage for price discrimination. Controlling the degree of product personalization provides the firm with an additional tool to curb ratcheting forces arising from consumers' awareness of being price discriminated.

A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's valuation is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of an infinite-horizon, mechanism selection game. Despite being able to choose mechanisms, the seller can do no better and no worse than if he chose prices in each period, so that he is subject to Coase's conjecture. Our analysis marries insights from information and mechanism design with those from the literature on durable goods.

Mutual fund prospectuses contain a wealth of qualitative information about fund strategies, yet a systematic analysis of this content is missing from the literature. We use machine learning to group together funds with similar strategy descriptions, and ask whether they act in accordance with the text. Despite weak legal recourse for investors, we find that mutual funds largely do keep their promises. We document a market-based disciplinary mechanism: when funds diverge from their group's core strategy, investors withdraw capital.

The major cities of the world have attracted a flurry of out-of-town (OOT) home buyers. Such capital inflows affect housing affordability, the spatial distribution of residents, construction, labor income, wealth, and ultimately welfare. We develop a spatial equilibrium model of a city with substantial heterogeneity among residents. We calibrate the model to the New York and Vancouver metro areas. The observed increase in OOT purchases is associated with 1.1% (5.0%) higher house prices and a 0.1% (0.34%) welfare loss in New York (Vancouver).

The authors propose that purchasing luxury can be a unique means to engage in sustainable consumption because high-end products are particularly durable. Six studies examine the sustainability of high-end products, investigate consumer decision making when considering high-end versus ordinary goods, and identify effective marketing strategies to emphasize product durability, an important and valued dimension of sustainable consumption.

We consider the pricing problem faced by a revenue maximizing platform matching price-sensitive customers to flexible supply units within a geographic area. This can be interpreted as the problem faced in the short-term by a ride-hailing platform. We propose a two-dimensional framework in which a platform selects prices for different locations, and drivers respond by choosing where to relocate in equilibrium based on prices, travel costs and driver congestion levels.

Participants in matching markets face search and screening costs which prevent the market from clearing efficiently. In many settings, the rise of online matching platforms has dramatically reduced the cost of finding and contacting potential partners. While one might expect both sides of the market to benefit from reduced search costs, this is far from guaranteed. In particular, this change may force participants to screen more potential partners before finding one who is willing to accept their offer.