Consumer behaviour

From its inception, demand estimation has faced the problem of “many prices.”

The classical problem of the monopolist faced with an unknown demand curve is considered in a simple stochastic setting.

We specify an equilibrium model of car ownership with private information where individuals sell and purchase new and second-hand cars over their life-cycle.

This paper documents significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures at older ages in the United Kingdom compared to the United States, in spite of income paths being similar. Several possible causes are explored, including different employment paths, housing ownership and expenses, levels and paths of health status, number of household members, and out-of-pocket medical expenditures.

Soft drink taxes have been implemented in 50 jurisdictions (as of August 2019). We review the evidence on their effects, summarising 27 studies of taxes in 11 jurisdictions.

We propose a demand model where consumers simultaneously choose a few different goods from a large menu of available goods, and choose how much to consume of each good.

I characterize how house price shocks affect consumption inequality using a life-cycle model of housing and non-housing consumption with incomplete markets.

This research explored the prevalence of gifting in the general population and how it varied between different groups, based on a new quantitative survey was conducted with a representative sample of adults in Great Britain. The survey also explored the nature of gifting – including the number and value of gifts given, who they were given to, and the motivations for doing so – as well as awareness of inheritance tax rules and exemptions.

Alcohol consumption is associated with costs to society from anti-social behaviour, crime and public costs of policing and health care. These externalities are non-linear in alcohol consumption, with a small number of heavy drinkers creating the majority of the costs. Governments attempt to reduce problematic alcohol consumption through restricting availability and with policies that aim to increase prices. In this paper we study the design of alcohol taxes.

We analyse a simple Hotelling model in which retailers and manufacturers endogenously advertise their respective brands; we account for the impact of advertising on retailer–manufacturer bargaining and downstream competition. The model predicts that retailers advertise their store brands less when advertising is more rivalrous.

Even short financial education programmes can change how adolescents make intertemporal choices - the basis of consumption and savings decisions, and more sophisticated financial decision-making more generally.

While poverty may impair decision-making, some of the apparently irrational behaviour observed among the poor may have a rational expectation. In particular, estimates of "present-bias" among the poor may be exaggerated if poor individuals are credit-constrained and expect to have greater liquidity in future. I conduct an experiment in rural Pakistan which provides evidence of this effect.

This paper studies regulatory policy interventions aimed at protecting vulnerable consumers who are disengaged and thus exposed to exploitation. We model heterogeneous consumer switching costs alongside asymmetric market shares.

With the aim of determining the welfare implications of price change in consumption data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that an absence of cycles in this preference relation characterizes a model of demand where consumers trade-off the utility of consumption against the disutility of expenditure.

This paper examines the equilibrium effects of alternative financial aid policies intended to promote college participation. We build an overlapping generations life cycle model with education, labor supply, and consumption/saving decisions.

Since 2007 it has not been permitted to advertise food and drink that is high in fat, salt or sugar during children's television programmes. Evidence from Ofcom suggests that in 2016 children spent 64% of their viewing time watching programmes outside children’s programming. Recent discussion around the possibility of a second wave of the Government’s childhood obesity strategy has included calls from health campaigners and leaders of all the main opposition parties to extend current restrictions on when food and drink products that are high in fat, salt or sugar can be advertised to cover all pre-watershed advertising.