Choice Models and Permutation Invariance: Demand Estimation in Differentiated Products Markets

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Singh, Amandeep, Liu, Ye, Yoganarasimhan, Hema
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Singh, Amandeep
Liu, Ye
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
author_facet Singh, Amandeep
Liu, Ye
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
contents Choice modeling is at the core of understanding how changes to the competitive landscape affect consumer choices and reshape market equilibria. In this paper, we propose a fundamental characterization of choice functions that encompasses a wide variety of extant choice models. We demonstrate how non-parametric estimators like neural nets can easily approximate such functionals and overcome the curse of dimensionality that is inherent in the non-parametric estimation of choice functions. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that our proposed functionals can flexibly capture underlying consumer behavior in a completely data-driven fashion and outperform traditional parametric models. As demand settings often exhibit endogenous features, we extend our framework to incorporate estimation under endogenous features. Further, we also describe a formal inference procedure to construct valid confidence intervals on objects of interest like price elasticity. Finally, to assess the practical applicability of our estimator, we utilize a real-world dataset from S. Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995). Our empirical analysis confirms that the estimator generates realistic and comparable own- and cross-price elasticities that are consistent with the observations reported in the existing literature.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_07090
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Choice Models and Permutation Invariance: Demand Estimation in Differentiated Products Markets
Singh, Amandeep
Liu, Ye
Yoganarasimhan, Hema
Econometrics
Machine Learning
Choice modeling is at the core of understanding how changes to the competitive landscape affect consumer choices and reshape market equilibria. In this paper, we propose a fundamental characterization of choice functions that encompasses a wide variety of extant choice models. We demonstrate how non-parametric estimators like neural nets can easily approximate such functionals and overcome the curse of dimensionality that is inherent in the non-parametric estimation of choice functions. We demonstrate through extensive simulations that our proposed functionals can flexibly capture underlying consumer behavior in a completely data-driven fashion and outperform traditional parametric models. As demand settings often exhibit endogenous features, we extend our framework to incorporate estimation under endogenous features. Further, we also describe a formal inference procedure to construct valid confidence intervals on objects of interest like price elasticity. Finally, to assess the practical applicability of our estimator, we utilize a real-world dataset from S. Berry, Levinsohn, and Pakes (1995). Our empirical analysis confirms that the estimator generates realistic and comparable own- and cross-price elasticities that are consistent with the observations reported in the existing literature.
title Choice Models and Permutation Invariance: Demand Estimation in Differentiated Products Markets
topic Econometrics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07090