Intertemporal decisions often involve tradeoffs between certain costs and the timing of consumption or ownership. We argue and empirically demonstrate that, ceteris paribus, consumers are more impatient for hedonic (or luxury) goods than utilitarian (or necessity) goods. However, when making actual purchase decisions involving cost-timing tradeoffs, the effect is reversed and consumers are more...

• Suppose we are attempting to model the buying preferences of several consumers based on past purchases, e.g. as in the Netflix recommender system. We assume that people with similar tastes tend to buy similar items and their buying history is related. Inferring the preferences for a customer based only on his past purchases may be tough, because that customer may not have rated enough movies ...

This perspective article builds upon the theory of local thinking in interpretation and prediction of consumer behavior in a contemporary world of information overload. It is shown that even informed and socially and environmentally responsible consumers (consumers 3.0) exhibit selective recall, limited attention, and bounded search in the perception and interpretation of price and quality of p...

In this paper we examine the relationship between the timing of food stamp receipt and consumption patterns. We combine data on state distribution dates with scanner data on a panel of households. Consistent with previous work we find that purchases of a variety of goods are higher on receipt days. Additionally, we find that when receipt days are more likely to be on weekends, total monthly con...

Purchases and sales of operating assets by firms generated $162 billion for shareholders over the past 20 years. This contrasts sharply with the evidence on mergers. This paper characterizes the behavior of value-maximizing firms, which could grow organically, purchase existing assets, or sell assets. The approach yields an endogenous selection model that links asset purchases and sales to fund...

Electric vehicle (EV) aggregator, as an agent between the electricity market and EV owners, participates in the future and pool market to supply EVs’ requirement. Because of the uncertain nature of pool prices and EVs’ behaviour, this paper proposed a two-stage scenario-based model to obtain optimal decision making of an EV aggregator. To deal with mentioned uncertainties, the aggregator’s risk...

The Brazilian government often misclassifies the goods it buys. That makes it hard to audit government expenditures. We cannot know whether the price paid for a ballpoint pen (code #7510) was reasonable if the pen was misclassified as a technical drawing pen (code # 6675) or as any other good. This paper shows how we can use machine learning to reduce misclassification. I trained a support vect...

Consider agents who are heterogeneous in their preferences and wealth levels. These agents may acquire information prior to choosing an investment that has a property of no-arbitrage, and each piece of information bears a corresponding cost. We associate a numeric index to each information purchase (information-cost pair). This index describes the normalized value of the information purchase: i...

We study the nonparametric identification of distributions of utility functions in a multiple purchase setting with a finite number of consumers. Each utility function takes as arguments subsets or, alternatively, quantities of the multiple goods. We exploit mathematical insights from auction theory to generically identify the distribution of utility functions. We use price variation and aggreg...

This paper develops a model of conversion behavior (i.e., converting store visits into purchases) that predicts each customer’s buying probability based on an observed history of visits and purchases. We offer an individual-level probability model that allows for cross-customer heterogeneity in a very flexible manner. We also allow visits to have a variety of effects in the purchasing process. ...