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Decoding Consumer Preferences Using Attention-Based Language Models

Joshua Foster, Fredrik Odegaard

arXiv 23 Jul 2025 · Econometrics

arXiv:2507.17564 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text

Abstract

This paper proposes a new demand estimation method using attention-based language models. An encoder-only language model is trained in a two-stage process to analyze the natural language descriptions of used cars from a large US-based online auction marketplace. The approach enables semi-nonparametrically estimation for the demand primitives of a structural model representing the private valuations and market size for each vehicle listing. In the first stage, the language model is fine-tuned to encode the target auction outcomes using the natural language vehicle descriptions. In the second stage, the trained language model's encodings are projected into the parameter space of the structural model. The model's capability to conduct counterfactual analyses within the trained market space is validated using a subsample of withheld auction data, which includes a set of unique "zero shot" instances.

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Most heavily cited references

The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.

ReferenceIntensityMentionsSectionsMain text
1Zehan Li, Xin Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Dingkun Long, Pengjun Xie, and M… (2023) Towards general text embeddings with multi-stage contrastive learning, 20230.84333100%
2Jacob Devlin, Ming-Wei Chang, Kenton Lee, and Kristina Toutanova (2018) Bert: Pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding0.64422100%
3Tomás Mikolov, Wen-tau Yih, and Geoffrey Zweig (2013) Linguistic regularities in continuous space word representations0.64422100%
4Adly Templeton (2024) Scaling monosemanticity: Extracting interpretable features from claude 3 sonnet0.64422100%
5Jason Wei, Maarten Bosma, Vincent Y Zhao, Kelvin Guu, Adams Wei Yu,… (2021) Finetuned language models are zero-shot learners0.64422100%
6Sherwin Rosen (1974) Hedonic prices and implicit markets: product differentiation in pure competition0.5112250%
7Jonah Berger, Ashlee Humphreys, Stefan Ludwig, Wendy W. Moe, Oded Ne… (2020) Uniting the tribes: Using text for marketing insight0.40511100%
8Zenan Chen and Jason Chan (2024) Large language model in creative work: The role of collaboration modality and user expertise0.40511100%
9Xiao Liu (2023) Deep learning in marketing: a review and research agenda0.40511100%
10Dinesh Puranam, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Vithala Narayan (2021) The impact of increase in minimum wages on consumer perceptions of service: A transformer model of online restaurant reviews0.40511100%

Showing the top 10 of 67 scored citations.