My dissertation consists of three empirical essays where I analyze animal products consumption and marketing. First using cross-sectional household data, I investigate the importance of consumption from home produce (self-provisioning) and conclude that studying food consumption decisions in isolation from production is not warranted for Turkey. I develop a testing procedure incorporated into l...

In this paper, we consider the problem of “importance sampling” from a high dynamic range image motivated by a computer graphics problem called image-based lighting. Image-based lighting is a method to light a scene by using real-world images as part of a 3D environment. Intuitively, the sampling problem reduces to finding representative points from the image such that they are in higher densit...

System theory for holographic representation of linear space-variant systems is derived. The utility of the resulting piecewise isoplanatic approximation (PIA) is illustrated by example application to the invariant system, ideal magnifier, and Fourier transformer. A method previously employed to holographically represent a space-variant system, the discrete approximation, is shown to be a speci...

We use the voluntary adoption of the NuVal shelf nutrition labels by a grocery retailer to estimate the value of these labels to shoppers in the yogurt category. Using an incomplete quadratic almost ideal demand system to represent consumer demand, we found a statistically significant positive effect of these shelf labels on demand for yogurt with above-average NuVal scores. The coefficients on...

The obesity epidemic and excessive consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages have led to proposals of economics-based interventions to promote healthy eating in the United States. Targeted food and beverage taxes and subsidies are prominent examples of such potential intervention strategies. This paper examines the differential effects of taxing sugar-sweetened beverages by calories and by ounce...