市场营销系学术报告:Estimating Search Models with Panel Data: Identification and Re-Examination of Preference Heterogeneity

主讲人:董晓静 美国圣塔克拉拉大学终身副教授

主办单位:商学院市场营销系

时间:20191120 1500-1630

地点:商学院武东路校区526

It is a common practice to examine only those purchased when inferring the consumer’s preference and tastes. In this study, we proposed a structural model approach to dive deeper into such question leveraging the click stream data. A structural model approach allows us to examine the decision process at individual consumer level, and obtain inferences for each consumer, for his/her preference and search cost. Using a unique data-set from an online retailer that contains panel information on consumers' search and purchase behavior, our proposed approach demonstrated that when ignoring search costs, we overestimate consumers’ preference heterogeneity by 40%. Using the example of personalized pricing, we show that this bias has important consequences for targeted marketing. Finally, we show that panel dimension of the data is crucial for identifying preference heterogeneity separately from search costs.