Most US consumers are charged a near-constant retail price for electricity, despite substantial hourly variation in the wholesale market price. The Smart Grid is a set of emerging technologies that will facilitate "real-time pricing" for electricity and increase price elasticity of demand. This paper simulates the e¤ects of this increased demand elasticity using counterfactual simulations in a ...

This paper estimates the impact of what has come to be referred as the "Cadillac tax" provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act on health care consumption and the employer offer rate of health insurance in the United States. Because this tax on high cost health plans has yet to be implemented, no data currently exist regarding its effect. Therefore, the datasets used in this p...

Many industries including music and e-book industries have been making or already made the transition from physical to digital goods in a couple of decades. Since the transformation fundamentally affects the cost structure, consumers’ purchasing behavior, and other critical factors in the industries, it is important to understand the changes that the transition has brought about. This paper emp...

the bullwhip effect plays an important role in supply chain management especially in a highly volatile market where prices change due to many unexpected reasons brought about by different phenomenon such as global warming. traditionally, one may expect a reduction on demand when there is a significant move on market price. however, the recent changes on global economy imply that the demand for ...

We estimate a random utility model of demand to measure consumer response to package downsizing in consumer goods markets. To our knowledge this paper provides the first estimates of consumer response to package size. We perform the analysis using Nielsen Homescan data on bulk ice cream purchases of a panel of households in Chicago, between 1998 and 2007. The estimation framework involves model...

For many products the average price paid by consumers falls during periods of high demand. We use information from a large supermarket chain to decompose the decrease in the average price into a substitution effect, due to an increase in the share of cheaper products, and a price reduction effect. We find that for almost all the products we study the substitution effect explains a large part of...

This paper uses fare changes in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey to estimate the price elasticity of demand for urban rail transit. In two cases there is a significant increase (30%+), third 60-day holiday. Ridership responds sharply expected direction all three cities, implying elasticities which range across cities from −.23 −0.32. addition, suggestive evidence that temporary holiday l...

Analysis of spatial panel data is of great importance and interest in spatial econometrics. Here we consider cigarette demand in a spatial panel of 46 states of the US over a 30-year period. We construct a demand equation to examine the elasticity of per pack cigarette price and per capita disposable income. The existing spatial panel models account for both spatial autocorrelation and state-wi...

Many new products presumed to be privately beneficial to the poor have a high price elasticity of demand and ultimately zero take-up rate at market price. This has led governments and donors to provide subsidies to increase take-up, with the concern of trying to limit their cost. In this study, we use data from a two-year field experiment in rural China to define the optimum subsidy scheme that...