Making sustainable profits from a baseline zero price and motivating free consumers to convert to premium subscribers is a continuing challenge for all freemium communities. Prior research has causally established that social engagement (Oestreicher-Singer and Zalmanson 2013) and peer influence (Bapna and Umyarov 2015) are two important drivers of users converting to premium subscribers in such...

1 This paper has bene…ted from the communications with Steve Matthews on related issues. The authors also wish to thank Jacob Goeree for suggesting the approach taken in this study, and to Jan Boone, Dan Levin, and Sander Onderstal for helpful comments and discussions. The paper is a signi…cant extension of Chapter 4 of Audrey Hu's Ph.D. thesis " Essays on Auctions, " sponsored by the Netherlan...

Using data on cohabitation from the 1995-1997 March Current Population Survey, the first three years in which the survey included "unmarried partner" as a relationship category, I measure the relationship between earnings and cohabitation as well as other marital statuses across racial-ethnic groups for men and women. Results show that among 25-54 year-old workers, black women have the largest ...

This issue brief explores the use of premium assistance in publicly financed health insurance coverage programs. In the context of Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), premium assistance entails using federal and state funds to subsidize the premiums for the purchase of private insurance coverage for eligible individuals. This paper considers the evolution of prem...

Funding of a given set of cash flow liabilities is typically arranged through level premium or a single premium. The question of optimality of the stream of premium payments has been largely ignored in the existing insurance literature. In this work, we propose a set of natural constraints on the premium flows and develop an optimal premium structure to fund any existing liability structure. Th...

The paper develops a theory for equity premium around macroeconomic announcements. Stock returns realized around pre-scheduled macroeconomic announcements, such as the employment report and the FOMC statements, account for 55% of the market equity premium during the 1961-2014 period, and virtually 100% of it during the later period of 1997-2014, where more announcement data are available. We pr...

Managing Premium Data

BACKGROUND Increasing tobacco taxes to increase price is a proven tobacco control measure. This article investigates how smokers respond to tax and price increases in their choice of discount brand cigarettes versus premium brands. OBJECTIVE To estimate how increase in the tax rate can affect smokers' choice of discount brands versus premium brands. METHODS Using data from International Tob...

Charles D. Kochakian has had a long and distinguished career in the field of endocrine physiology. His most important work concerned the anabolic actions of steroids. While still a graduate student, Kochakian showed that the anabolic effects of male hormones could be quantitated by measuring the changes they caused in urinary nitrogen balance. He subsequently showed that this anabolic effect wa...

Aggregation functions and utility functions belong to very interesting parts of modern decision making theory. We develop basic concept of the connection of aggregation functions theory and utility theory to determine gross annual premium in general insurance. We introduce specific values of the gross annual premium on the basis of aggregation of the person’s utility functions which were determ...