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Articles 1 - 30 of 60
Full-Text Articles in Economics
Efficient Estimation Of Average Derivatives In Npiv Models: Simulation Comparisons Of Neural Network Estimators, Jiafeng Chen, Xiaohong Chen, Elie Tamer
Efficient Estimation Of Average Derivatives In Npiv Models: Simulation Comparisons Of Neural Network Estimators, Jiafeng Chen, Xiaohong Chen, Elie Tamer
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) can be viewed as \emph{nonlinear sieves} that can approximate complex functions of high dimensional variables more effectively than linear sieves. We investigate the computational performance of various ANNs in nonparametric instrumental variables (NPIV) models of moderately high dimensional covariates that are relevant to empirical economics. We present two efficient procedures for estimation and inference on a weighted average derivative (WAD): an orthogonalized plug-in with optimally-weighted sieve minimum distance (OP-OSMD) procedure and a sieve efficient score (ES) procedure. Both estimators for WAD use ANN sieves to approximate the unknown NPIV function and are root-n asymptotically normal …
A Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Childhood Vaccination Behavior: Nash Versus Kant, Philippe De Donder, Humberto Llavador, Stefan Penczynski, John E. Roemer, Roberto Vélez
A Game-Theoretic Analysis Of Childhood Vaccination Behavior: Nash Versus Kant, Philippe De Donder, Humberto Llavador, Stefan Penczynski, John E. Roemer, Roberto Vélez
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Whether or not to vaccinate one’s child is a decision that a parent may approach in several ways. The vaccination game, in which parents must choose whether to vaccinate a child against a disease, is one with positive externalities (herd immunity). In some societies, not vaccinating is an increasingly prevalent behavior, due to deleterious side effects that parents believe may accompany vaccination. The standard game-theoretic approach assumes that parents make decisions according to the Nash behavioral protocol, which is individualistic and non-cooperative. Because of the positive externality that each child’s vaccination generates for others, the Nash equilibrium suffers from a …
The Measuring Of Assortativeness In Marriage, Pierre-André Chiappori, Monica Costa-Dias, Costas Meghir
The Measuring Of Assortativeness In Marriage, Pierre-André Chiappori, Monica Costa-Dias, Costas Meghir
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Measuring the extent to which assortative matching
differs between two economies is challenging when the marginal distributions of the characteristic along which sorting takes place (e.g. education) also changes for either or both sexes. Drawing from the statistics literature we define simple conditions that any index has to satisfy to provide a measure of change in sorting that is not distorted by changes in the marginal distributions of the characteristic. While our characterisation of indices of assortativeness is not complete, and hence cannot exclude the possibility of multiple indices providing contradictory results, in an empirical application to US data we …
A Structural Model Of Organizational Buying For B2b Markets: Innovation Adoption With Share Of Wallet Contracts, Navid Mojir, K. Sudhir
A Structural Model Of Organizational Buying For B2b Markets: Innovation Adoption With Share Of Wallet Contracts, Navid Mojir, K. Sudhir
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The paper develops the first structural model of organizational buying to study innovation diffusion in a B2B market. Our model is particularly applicable for routinized exchange relationships, whereby centralized buyers periodically evaluate and choose contracts, then downstream users or- der items on contracted terms. The model captures different utility tradeoffs for users and buyers while accounting for how buyer and user choices interact to impact user adoption/usage and buyer contracting. Further, the paper considers the dynamics induced by share of wallet (SOW) pricing contracts, commonly used in B2B markets to reward customer loyalty with discounts for buying more than a …
Incorporating Search And Sales Information In Demand Estimation, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Incorporating Search And Sales Information In Demand Estimation, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We propose an approach to modeling and estimating discrete choice demand that allows for a large number of zero sale observations, rich unobserved heterogeneity, and endogenous prices. We do so by modeling small market sizes through Poisson arrivals. Each of these arriving consumers then solves a standard discrete choice problem. We present a Bayesian IV estimation approach that addresses sampling error in product shares and scales well to rich data environments. The data requirements are traditional market-level data and measures of consumer search intensity. After presenting simulation studies, we consider an empirical application of air travel demand where product-level sales …
Endogenous Spatial Production Networks: Quantitative Implications For Trade & Productivity, Piyush Panigrahi
Endogenous Spatial Production Networks: Quantitative Implications For Trade & Productivity, Piyush Panigrahi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Larger Indian firms selling inputs to other firms tend to have more customers, tend to be used more intensively by their customers, and tend to have larger customers. Motivated by these regularities, I propose a novel empirical model of trade featuring endogenous formation of input-output linkages between spatially distant firms. The empirical model consists of (a) a theoretical framework that accommodates first order features of firm-to-firm network data, (b) a maximum likelihood framework for structural estimation that is uninhibited by the scale of data, and (c) a procedure for counterfactual analysis that speaks to the effects of micro- and macro- …
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study how organizational boundaries affect pricing decisions using comprehensive data from a large U.S. airline. We document that the firm’s advanced pricing algorithm, utilizing inputs from different organizational teams, is subject to multiple biases. To quantify the impacts of these biases, we estimate a structural demand model using sales and search data. We recover the demand curves the firm believes it faces using forecasting data. In counterfactuals, we show that correcting biases introduced by organizational teams individually have little impact on market outcomes, but coordinating organizational outcomes leads to higher prices/revenues and increased deadweight loss in the markets studied.
Optimal Unilateral Carbon Policy, Samuel Kortum, David A. Weisbach
Optimal Unilateral Carbon Policy, Samuel Kortum, David A. Weisbach
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We derive the optimal unilateral policy in a general equilibrium model of trade and climate change where one region of the world imposes a climate policy and the rest of the world does not. A climate policy in one region shifts activities—extraction, production, and consumption—in the other region. The optimal policy trades off the costs of these distortions. The optimal policy can be implemented through: (i) a nominal tax on extraction at a rate equal to the global marginal harm from emissions, (ii) a tax on imports of energy and goods, and a rebate of taxes on exports of energy …
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Firms often involve multiple departments for critical decisions that may result in coordination failures. Using data from a large U.S. airline, we document the presence of important pricing biases that differ significantly from dynamically optimal profit maximization. However, these biases can be rationalized as a “second-best” after accounting for department decision rights. We show that assuming prices are generated through profit maximization biases demand estimates and that second-best prices can persist, even under improvements to pricing algorithm inputs. Our results suggest caution in abstracting from organizational structure and drawing inferences from firms’ pricing decisions alone.
Coresets For Regressions With Panel Data, Lingxiao Huang, K. Sudhir, Nisheeth Vishnoi
Coresets For Regressions With Panel Data, Lingxiao Huang, K. Sudhir, Nisheeth Vishnoi
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper introduces the problem of coresets for regression problems to panel data settings. We first define coresets for several variants of regression problems with panel data and then present efficient algorithms to construct coresets of size that depend polynomially on 1/ε (where ε is the error parameter) and the number of regression parameters – independent of the number of individuals in the panel data or the time units each individual is observed for. Our approach is based on the Feldman-Langberg framework in which a key step is to upper bound the “total sensitivity” that is roughly the sum of …
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Organizational Structure And Pricing: Evidence From A Large U.S. Airline, Ali Hortaçsu, Olivia R. Natan, Hayden Parsley, Timothy Schwieg, Kevin R. Williams
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Although typically modeled as a centralized firm decision, pricing often involves multiple organizational teams that have decision rights over specific pricing inputs. We study team input decisions using comprehensive data from a large U.S. airline. We document that pricing at a sophisticated firm is subject to miscoordination across teams, uses persistently biased forecasts, and does not account for cross-price elasticities. With structural demand estimates derived from sales and search data, we find that addressing one team’s biases in isolation has little impact on market outcomes. We show that teams do not optimally account for biases introduced by other teams. We …
Herding With Heterogeneous Ability: An Application To Organ Transplantation, Stephanie De Mel, Kaivan Munshi, Soenje Reiche, Hamid Sabourian
Herding With Heterogeneous Ability: An Application To Organ Transplantation, Stephanie De Mel, Kaivan Munshi, Soenje Reiche, Hamid Sabourian
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
There are many economic environments in which an object is offered sequentially to prospective buyers. It is often observed that once the object for sale is turned down by one or more agents, those that follow do the same. One explanation that has been proposed for this phenomenon is that agents making choices further down the line rationally ignore their own assessment of the object’s quality and herd behind their predecessors. Our research adds a new dimension to the canonical herding model by allowing agents to di er in their ability to assess the quality of the offered object. We …
Robust Inference With Stochastic Local Unit Root Regressors In Predictive Regressions, Yanbo Liu, Peter C. B. Phillips
Robust Inference With Stochastic Local Unit Root Regressors In Predictive Regressions, Yanbo Liu, Peter C. B. Phillips
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper explores predictive regression models with stochastic unit root (STUR) components and robust inference procedures that encompass a wide class of persistent and time-varying stochastically nonstationary regressors. The paper extends the mechanism of endogenously generated instrumentation known as IVX, showing that these methods remain valid for short and long-horizon predictive regressions in which the predictors have STUR and local STUR (LSTUR) generating mechanisms. Both mean regression and quantile regression methods are considered. The asymptotic distributions of the IVX estimators are new and require some new methods in their derivation. The distributions are compared to previous results and, as in …
Limit Theory For Locally Flat Functional Coefficient Regression, Peter C. B. Phillips, Ying Wang
Limit Theory For Locally Flat Functional Coefficient Regression, Peter C. B. Phillips, Ying Wang
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Functional coefficient (FC) regressions allow for systematic flexibility in the responsiveness of a dependent variable to movements in the regressors, making them attractive in applications where marginal effects may depend on covariates. Such models are commonly estimated by local kernel regression methods. This paper explores situations where responsiveness to covariates is locally flat or fixed. In such cases, the limit theory of FC kernel regression is shown to depend intimately on functional shape in ways that affect rates of convergence, optimal bandwidth selection, estimation, and inference. The paper develops new asymptotics that take account of shape characteristics of the function …
On Multicointegration, Peter C. B. Phillips, Igor Kheifets
On Multicointegration, Peter C. B. Phillips, Igor Kheifets
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
A semiparametric triangular systems approach shows how multicointegration can occur naturally in an I(1) cointegrated regression model. The framework reveals the source of multicointegration as singularity of the long run error covariance matrix in an I(1) system, a feature noted but little explored in earlier work. Under such singularity, cointegrated I(1) systems embody a multicointegrated structure and may be analyzed and estimated without appealing to the associated I(2) system but with consequential asymptotic properties that can introduce asymptotic bias into conventional methods of cointegrating regression. The present paper shows how estimation of such systems may be accomplished under multicointegration without …
Estimation And Inference With Near Unit Roots, Peter C. B. Phillips
Estimation And Inference With Near Unit Roots, Peter C. B. Phillips
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
New methods are developed for identifying, estimating and performing inference with nonstationary time series that have autoregressive roots near unity. The approach subsumes unit root (UR), local unit root (LUR), mildly integrated (MI) and mildly explosive (ME) specifications in the new model formulation. It is shown how a new parameterization involving a localizing rate sequence that characterizes departures from unity can be consistently estimated in all cases. Simple pivotal limit distributions that enable valid inference about the form and degree of nonstationarity apply for MI and ME specifications and new limit theory holds in UR and LUR cases. Normalizing and …
Discrete Fourier Transforms Of Fractional Processes With Econometric Applications, Peter C. B. Phillips
Discrete Fourier Transforms Of Fractional Processes With Econometric Applications, Peter C. B. Phillips
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
The discrete Fourier transform (dft) of a fractional process is studied. An exact representation of the dft is given in terms of the component data, leading to the frequency domain form of the model for a fractional process. This representation is particularly useful in analyzing the asymptotic behavior of the dft and periodogram in the nonstationary case when the memory parameter d ≥ 1 2: Various asymptotic approximations are established including some new hypergeometric function representations that are of independent interest. It is shown that smoothed periodogram spectral estimates remain consistent for frequencies away from the origin in the nonstationary …
Lookalike Targeting On Others' Journeys: Brand Versus Performance Marketing, K. Sudhir, Seung Yoon Lee, Subroto Roy
Lookalike Targeting On Others' Journeys: Brand Versus Performance Marketing, K. Sudhir, Seung Yoon Lee, Subroto Roy
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Lookalike Targeting is a widely used model-based ad targeting approach that uses a seed database of individuals to identify matching “lookalikes” for targeted customer acquisition. An advertiser has to make two key choices: (1) who to seed on and (2) seed-match rank range. First, we assess if and how seeding by others’ journey stages impact clickthrough (upstream behavior desirable for brand marketing) and donation (downstream behavior desirable in performance marketing). Overall, we find that lookalike targeting using other’s journeys can be effective-third parties can indeed identify factors unobserved to the advertiser merely from others’ journey stage to improve targeting. Further, …
Foundations Of Demand Estimation, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Foundations Of Demand Estimation, Steven T. Berry, Philip A. Haile
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Demand elasticities and other features of demand are critical determinants of the answers to most positive and normative questions about market power or the functioning of markets in practice. As a result, reliable demand estimation is an essential input to many types of research in Industrial Organization and other fields of economics. This chapter presents a discussion of some foundational issues in demand estimation. We focus on the distinctive challenges of demand estimation and strategies one can use to overcome them. We cover core models, alternative data settings, common estimation approaches, the role and choice of instruments, and nonparametric identification.
Selling Impressions: Efficiency Vs. Competition, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris, Constantine Sorokin, Eyal Winter
Selling Impressions: Efficiency Vs. Competition, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris, Constantine Sorokin, Eyal Winter
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In digital advertising, a publisher selling impressions faces a trade-o¤ in deciding how precisely to match advertisers with viewers. A more precise match generates efficiency gains that the publisher can hope to exploit. A coarser match will generate a thicker market and thus more competition. The publisher can control the precision of the match by controlling the amount of information that advertisers have about viewers. We characterize the optimal trade-off when impressions are sold by auction. The publisher pools premium matches for advertisers (when there will be less competition on average) but gives advertisers full information about lower quality matches.
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study settings in which, prior to playing an incomplete information game, players observe many draws of private signals about the state from some information structure. Signals are i.i.d. across draws, but may display arbitrary correlation across players. For each information structure, we define a simple learning efficiency index, which only considers the statistical distance between the worst-informed player’s marginal signal distributions in different states. We show, first, that this index characterizes the speed of common learning (Cripps, Ely, Mailath, and Samuelson, 2008): In particular, the speed at which players achieve approximate common knowledge of the state coincides with the …
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study settings in which, prior to playing an incomplete information game, players observe many draws of private signals about the state from some information structure. Signals are i.i.d. across draws, but may display arbitrary correlation across players. For each information structure, we define a simple learning efficiency index, which only considers the statistical distance between the worst-informed player’s marginal signal distributions in different states. We show, first, that this index characterizes the speed of common learning (Cripps, Ely, Mailath, and Samuelson, 2008): In particular, the speed at which players achieve approximate common knowledge of the state coincides with the …
Experimental Persuasion, Ian Ball, José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez
Experimental Persuasion, Ian Ball, José-Antonio Espín-Sánchez
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We introduce experimental persuasion between Sender and Receiver. Sender chooses an experiment to perform from a feasible set of experiments. Receiver observes the realization of this experiment and chooses an action. We characterize optimal persuasion in this baseline regime and in an alternative regime in which Sender can commit to garble the outcome of the experiment. Our model includes Bayesian persuasion as the special case in which every experiment is feasible; however, our analysis does not require concavification. Since we focus on experiments rather than beliefs, we can accommodate general preferences including costly experiments and non-Bayesian inference.
Information Markets And Nonmarkets, Dirk Bergemann, Marco Ottaviani
Information Markets And Nonmarkets, Dirk Bergemann, Marco Ottaviani
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
As large amounts of data become available and can be communicated more easily and processed more e¤ectively, information has come to play a central role for economic activity and welfare in our age. This essay overviews contributions to the industrial organization of information markets and nonmarkets, while attempting to maintain a balance between foundational frameworks and more recent developments. We start by reviewing mechanism-design approaches to modeling the trade of information. We then cover ratings, predictions, and recommender systems. We turn to forecasting contests, prediction markets, and other institutions designed for collecting and aggregating information from decentralized participants. Finally, we …
Corrective Regulation With Imperfect Instruments, Eduardo Dávila, Ansgar Walther
Corrective Regulation With Imperfect Instruments, Eduardo Dávila, Ansgar Walther
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper studies the optimal design of second-best corrective regulation, when some agents or activities cannot be perfectly regulated. We show that policy elasticities and Pigouvian wedges are sufficient statistics to characterize the marginal welfare impact of regulatory policies in a large class of environments. We show that the optimal second-best policy is determined by a subset of policy elasticities: leakage elasticities, and characterize the marginal value of relaxing regulatory constraints. We apply our results to scenarios with unregulated agents/activities and with uniform regulation across agents/activities. We illustrate our results in applications to shadow banking, scale-invariant regulation, asset substitution, and …
Holding Up Green Energy, Nicholas Ryan
Holding Up Green Energy, Nicholas Ryan
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Green energy is produced by relationship-specific assets that are vulnerable to hold-up if contracts are not strictly enforced. I study the role of counterparty risk in the procurement of green energy using data on the universe of solar procurement auctions in India. The Indian context allows clean estimates of how risk affects procurement, because solar power plants set up in the same states, by the same firms, are procured in auctions variously intermediated by either risky states themselves or the central government. I find that: (i) the counterparty risk of an average state increases solar energy prices by 10%; (ii) …
Nonlinear Pricing With Finite Information, Dirk Bergemann, Edmund M. Yeh, Jinkun Zhang
Nonlinear Pricing With Finite Information, Dirk Bergemann, Edmund M. Yeh, Jinkun Zhang
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We analyze nonlinear pricing with finite information. We consider a multi-product environment where each buyer has preferences over a d-dimensional variety of goods. The seller is limited to offering a finite number n of d-dimensional choices. The limited menu reflects a finite communication capacity between the buyer and seller. We identify necessary conditions that the optimal finite menu must satisfy, for either the socially efficient or the revenue-maximizing mechanism. These conditions require that information be bundled, or "quantized," optimally. We introduce vector quantization and establish that the losses due to finite menus converge to zero at a rate …
Curse Of Democracy: Evidence From The 21st Century, Yusuke Narita, Ayumi Sudo
Curse Of Democracy: Evidence From The 21st Century, Yusuke Narita, Ayumi Sudo
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
Democracy is widely believed to contribute to economic growth and public health. However, we find that this conventional wisdom is no longer true and even reversed; democracy has persistent negative impacts on GDP growth since the beginning of this century. This finding emerges from five different instrumental variable strategies. Our analysis suggests that democracies cause slower growth through less investment, less trade, and slower value-added growth in manufacturing and services. For 2020, democracy is also found to cause more deaths from Covid-19.
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Learning Efficiency Of Multi-Agent Information Structures, Mira Frick, Ryota Iijima, Yuhta Ishii
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study which multi-agent information structures are more effective at eliminating both first-order and higher-order uncertainty, and hence at facilitating efficient play in incomplete-information coordination games. We consider a learning setting à la Cripps, Ely, Mailath, and Samuelson (2008) where players have access to many private signal draws from an information structure. First, we characterize the rate at which players achieve approximate common knowledge of the state, based on a simple learning efficiency index. Notably, this coincides with the rate at which players’ first-order uncertainty vanishes, as higher-order uncertainty becomes negligible relative to first-order uncertainty after enough signal draws. Based …
Selling Impressions: Efficiency Vs. Competition, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Selling Impressions: Efficiency Vs. Competition, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In digital advertising, a publisher selling impressions faces a trade-off in deciding how precisely to match advertisers with viewers. A more precise match generates efficiency gains that the publisher can hope to exploit. A coarser match will generate a thicker market and thus more competition. The publisher can control the precision of the match by controlling the amount of information that advertisers have about viewers. We characterize the optimal trade-off when impressions are sold by auction. The publisher pools premium matches for advertisers (when there will be less competition on average) but gives advertisers full information about lower quality matches.