Topic Consumers

Sponsored Search: How Platforms Exacerbate Product Market Concentration

How does online advertising affect consumer behaviour, product pricing and competition? To analyse this, I develop a theory of digital markets where an intermediary provides a platform for firms to advertise their product and where consumers need to engage in costly search if they want to learn about the product characteristics. First, I show that when prices are observable...

Household responses to export prices - Evidence from an oil exporting country

The Role of Physician-Patient Similarity in Diagnosis and Treatment Decisions: Evidence from Antibiotic Prescribing

Physicians in primary care provide initial diagnosis and treatment for a diverse set of patients. However, whereas patients are demographically and socio-economically heterogeneous, physicians typically come from affluent and highly-educated backgrounds. As a result, there is often a mismatch between physicians and the community they serve. I investigate the role of patient-physician similarity...

GDPR and the Lost Generation of Innovative Apps

Using data on 4.1 million apps at the Google Play Store from 2016 to 2019, we document that GDPR induced the exit of about a third of available apps; and in the quarters following implementation, entry of new apps fell by half. We estimate a structural model of demand and entry in the app market. Comparing long-run equilibria with and without GDPR, we find that GDPR reduces consumer surplus and...

7th BCCP Forum

Leibniz ScienceCampusBerlin Centre for Consumer Policies (BCCP) Forum The Forum will bring together all BCCP fellows in law and economics who are engaged in the activities of the science campus. We will have the opportunity to learn about each other’s research during short presentations by the different partner institutions followed by open discussion. The objective of the meeting is to encourage...

Financial Education is Effective and Efficient

Financial Education Affects Financial Knowledge and Downstream Behaviors

We study the rapidly growing literature on the causal effects of financial education programs in a meta-analysis of 76 randomized experiments with a total sample size of over 160,000 individuals. Many of these experiments are published in top economics and finance journals. The evidence shows that financial education programs have, on average, positive causal treatment effects on financial knowledge ...

The Effect of Social Comparison on Debt Taking: Experimental Evidence

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...

Facebook Shadow Profiles

Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement ...

The Impact of Price Display on Financial Decisions

Credit decisions play an important role for the economic wellbeing of households. However, the complexity of products and varying price information display makes it hard for consumers to navigate this field. Empirical evidence has important implications for consumer protection policies, as many people fail to make optimal choices for themselves and struggle to understand credit cost information. Presenting ...