Price-Based Attention and Welfare

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Patel, Kaushil
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Patel, Kaushil
author_facet Patel, Kaushil
contents To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have different thresholds. Similar models of bounded rationality have been studied in the empirical marketing literature. We fully characterize the model, and using observational choice data alone, we identify the welfare implications of a price change. The behavioral content of our model overlaps with an important class of random utility models, but the welfare implications are meaningfully different. The distribution of equivalent variation under our model first-order stochastically dominates that under the random utility model.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_03813
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Price-Based Attention and Welfare
Patel, Kaushil
Theoretical Economics
Econometrics
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have different thresholds. Similar models of bounded rationality have been studied in the empirical marketing literature. We fully characterize the model, and using observational choice data alone, we identify the welfare implications of a price change. The behavioral content of our model overlaps with an important class of random utility models, but the welfare implications are meaningfully different. The distribution of equivalent variation under our model first-order stochastically dominates that under the random utility model.
title Price-Based Attention and Welfare
topic Theoretical Economics
Econometrics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.03813