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The Economics of Information, Frictions, and Consumer Behavior

Senney, Garrett T

Abstract Details

2016, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Economics.
My research concerns the dynamic effects of informational frictions on consumer behavior, focusing on consumer search and the use of the internet. The first chapter studies how geography affects behavior on Peer-to-Peer lending markets. Extensive literature on the traditional credit market finds that investors and lenders are sensitive to their distance from the borrower, due to the cost of information gathering and monitoring. Recent empirical work has found mixed results. I find that local lenders tend to bid earlier, bid larger amounts, and are more informed in the sense that they are better able to evaluate the underlying risk of borrowers. Lastly, I develop a simple model of social learning with heterogeneous agents that provides testable predictions. My results are consistent with this model; a listing with more early local bidding activity will attract more lenders, leading to a higher probability of funding and a lower final interest rate, if funded. This work suggests that the behavioral differences between local and nonlocal lenders are driven mostly by informational frictions and not merely preferences. Local lenders are better informed because they have easier and cheaper access to information, and this asymmetry contributes to explaining why geographic-based frictions are still present and relevant in online lending markets. The second chapter develops a dynamic model of consumer search that exploits intertemporal variation in within-period price and search cost distributions to estimate the population distribution from which consumers' search costs are initially drawn. We show that static approaches to estimating this distribution generally suffer from a dynamic sample selection bias because forward-looking consumers may delay their purchase in a way that depends on their individual search cost. We analyze identification of the population search cost distribution using only price data and develop estimable nonparametric bounds on the distribution function and a nonlinear least squares estimator for parametric models. We apply our estimators to analyze the online market for two widely used econometrics textbooks. Our results suggest that static estimates of the search cost distribution are biased upwards, in a distributional sense, relative to the true population distribution. In a small-scale simulation study, we show that this is typical in a dynamic setting where consumers with high search costs are more likely to delay purchase than those with lower search costs. The third chapter examines consumer search behavior in the market for 3D enabled high definition televisions. Utilizing a newly develop methodology, I examine price dispersion in a vertically differentiated market and separately identify the effects of search friction and product differentiation on price. I estimate that 65.6% of the price variation in this market is explained by search friction with the rest being attributable to vertical differentiation. Furthermore, I find that the search intensity in this market polarized: 69% of consumers only search one store while 17% of consumers search all the stores. My analysis concludes that search frictions are relatively more important than vertical differentiation in explaining the price dispersion in the 3D HDTV market.
James Blevins (Advisor)
Maryam Saeedi (Committee Member)
Richard Steckel (Committee Member)
Stephen Cosslett (Committee Member)
189 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Senney, G. T. (2016). The Economics of Information, Frictions, and Consumer Behavior [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1459960001

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Senney, Garrett. The Economics of Information, Frictions, and Consumer Behavior. 2016. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1459960001.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Senney, Garrett. "The Economics of Information, Frictions, and Consumer Behavior." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2016. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1459960001

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)