Topic Consumers

Consumption-Oriented Policy Instruments for Fostering Greenhouse Gas Mitigation

Most policy instruments to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have focused on producers, and on the energy efficiency of buildings, vehicles and other products. Behavioural changes related to climate change also impact ‘in-use’ emissions, and potentially, emissions both ‘upstream’ (including from imported goods) and ‘downstream’ (eg disposal). Consumption-oriented policies may provide avenues to ...

Why Are We Eating so Much Meat?

There are various reasons why humans may want to reduce their consumption of meat and other animal products. In the following, we lay out important stylized facts about individual meat consumption, and then discuss the challenges and puzzles surrounding effective behavior change toward more sustainable, plant-based diets.

Partitioned Pricing and Consumer Welfare

Abstract:   In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing impacts consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer...

Data Network Effects: The Example of Internet Search

Abstract:   The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is lacking. In this paper, we show that data as an input into machine learning tasks displays features that favor the hypothesis that data is a source of market power. We study the search result quality for search keywords on...

Antibiotic Prescribing and Diagnostic Testing: Physician Behavior in the Case of Urinary Tract Infection

Abstract: When a patient with symptoms of urinary tract infection arrives at a physician's office, it needs to decide which antibiotic drug to prescribe. A drug's efficacy in treating the infection depends on the individual, time-dependent resistance profile of the bacterium causing the infection. Physicians can conduct antibiotic susceptibility tests in order to create current resistance profiles...

Correlation neglect and belief formation

Eating Meat 2019 - Determinants, consequences and interventions

The goal of this workshop is to bring together scholars from the social sciences working on the various aspects of human consumption of animal products. We want to engage in a discussion about what we know and do not know about the consumption of meat and dairy, its economic and environmental consequences, as well as possible ways to design effective interventions. Topics include, but are not...

The 12th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by the Berlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) and supported by the Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and Technische Universität Berlin. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the heart of Berlin, one of...

Drug Firms’ payments and physician prescribing behavior in the US

Consumer Rating Dynamics

(joint with André Stenzel and Peter Schmidt) We consider dynamic price-setting in the presence of rating systems and asymmetric information about product quality. We provide a framework in which the price charged determines the characteristics of purchasing consumers. The price has two effects on future ratings: (i) a direct price effect on reviews, and (ii) an indirect selection effect...