|
on Discrete Choice Models |
| By: | Engelmann, Dirk; Friedrichsen, Jana; Kübler, Dorothea |
| Abstract: | Whether pro-social preferences identified in economic laboratories survive in natural market contexts is an important and contested issue. We find that the willingness to buy at a higher price when higher wages are paid to the worker in a laboratory experiment framed as a market exchange correlates both with the choice for a fair trade product before the laboratory experiment and with the willingness to pay a positive fair trade premium, elicited at the end of the experiment. These results support the notion that fairness preferences as assessed in laboratory experiments capture preferences in comparable situations outside the laboratory. |
| Keywords: | fairness,market experiments,external validity,fair trade |
| JEL: | C91 D01 D91 |
| Date: | 2018 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wzbmbh:spii2018203&r=dcm |
| By: | Willem Van Laarhoven; Aloys Borgers; Pauline Van den Berg |
| Abstract: | The main reason for this research was the bankruptcy of one the Dutch oldest and largest chain of department stores at the end of 2015. The main goal of this research is to find what, from a consumers’ perspective, a department store should look like. A four storey (1500 m2 each) building was assumed to be vacant in the shopping areas of the large and medium sized Dutch cities. In addition, it was assumed that each floor would accommodate only one department. The two main research questions were: 1) as department stores may offer more than four departments, which are the four most preferred departments, and 2) to which floor should each of the most preferred departments be allocated.This study measured consumers’ preferences by means of a survey among approximately 500 respondents. Six different departments were selected to be part of a department store: 1) Fashion, 2) Food, 3) Beauty, 4) Living, 5) Electronics, and 6) Active/outdoor. To familiarize the respondents with these departments, each respondent was asked to pick a number of sub-departments and services from a predefined list to fill each department. The floor area of each sub-department and service was provided. The sum of the floor areas per department had to be within the 1250-1750 m2 range.To answer the first research question, a stated choice approach was used. Each respondent was presented a number of pairs of the 15 possible combinations of four out of six departments. The multinomial logit (MNL) model was used to estimate the utility of each department. The order of preference appeared to be: 1) Fashion, 2) Living, 3) Food, 4) Beauty, 5) Active/outdoor, and 6) Electronics for females and 1) Electronics, 2) Fashion, 3) Food, 4) Living, 5) Active/outdoor and 6) Beauty for males.The second research question was answered by having respondents allocating departments to floors of the building. Per respondent, this was repeated three times with three randomly picked combinations of 4 departments. Again, the MNL model was used to estimate the utility of each floor for each department. Building on the results for the most preferred combinations of departments, the preferred composition for females is Food at the ground floor, Fashion at the 1st floor, Living at the 2nd floor and Beauty at the 3rd floor. For males, the third floor should contain Electronics. |
| Keywords: | Consumer preferences; Department Stores; Retail Research |
| JEL: | R3 |
| Date: | 2017–07–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2017_54&r=dcm |
| By: | Erik Brynjolfsson; Felix Eggers; Avinash Gannamaneni |
| Abstract: | GDP and derived metrics (e.g., productivity) have been central to understanding economic progress and well-being. In principle, the change in consumer surplus (compensating expenditure) provides a superior, and more direct, measure of the change in well-being, especially for digital goods, but in practice, it has been difficult to measure. We explore the potential of massive online choice experiments to measure consumers’ willingness to accept compensation for losing access to various digital goods and thereby estimate the consumer surplus generated from these goods. We test the robustness of the approach and benchmark it against established methods, including incentive compatible choice experiments that require participants to give up Facebook for a certain period in exchange for compensation. The proposed choice experiments show convergent validity and are massively scalable. Our results indicate that digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are missed by conventional measures of GDP and productivity. By periodically querying a large, representative sample of goods and services, including those which are not priced in existing markets, changes in consumer surplus and other new measures of well-being derived from these online choice experiments have the potential for providing cost-effective supplements to existing national income and product accounts. |
| JEL: | E01 O0 O4 |
| Date: | 2018–04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24514&r=dcm |