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Demand and Welfare Analysis in Discrete Choice Models with Social Interactions

Debopam Bhattacharya, Pascaline Dupas, Shin Kanaya

arXiv 10 May 2019 · Econometrics · publishedThe Review of Economic Studies (2023) · 13 citations (OpenAlex)

arXiv:1905.04028 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in binary choice settings with social interactions. Examples include subsidies for health-product adoption and vouchers for attending a high-achieving school. We establish the connection between econometrics of large games and Brock-Durlauf-type interaction models, under both I.I.D. and spatially correlated unobservables. We develop new convergence results for associated beliefs and estimates of preference-parameters under increasing-domain spatial asymptotics. Next, we show that even with fully parametric specifications and unique equilibrium, choice data, that are sufficient for counterfactual demand-prediction under interactions, are insufficient for welfare-calculations. This is because distinct underlying mechanisms producing the same interaction coefficient can imply different welfare-effects and deadweight-loss from a policy-intervention. Standard index-restrictions imply distribution-free bounds on welfare. We illustrate our results using experimental data on mosquito-net adoption in rural Kenya.

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Cited by, within the corpus

arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.

Citing paperIntensityMentionsSections
1Policy Targeting under Network Interference0.40511
2Identifying Causal Effects in Experiments with Spillovers and Non-compliance0.40511
3Heterogeneity in peer effects for binary outcomes0.40511
4When “Normalization Without Loss of Generality” Loses Generality0.40511