CONSUMER DEMAND FOR AND ATTITUDES TOWARD ALTERNATIVE BEEF LABELING STRATEGIES IN FRANCE, GERMANY, AND THE UK

A wide array of food safety scares and breakdowns have led to loss of consumer confidence in the quality and safety of beef products. To counteract such concerns, firms and regulators have the ability to utilize brands or labels to signal quality. Utilizing a mail survey in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we analyzed consumer preferences for alternative beef labeling strategies. Using an ordered probit model and a double bounded logit model, we estimate consumer preferences for alternative beef labeling programs. In general, results suggest that consumers have more confidence in government mandated labels as opposed to private brands. French and German consumers place a higher level of importance on brands and labels than do UK consumers. Results also suggest that more than 90% of surveyed consumers desire a mandatory labeling program for beef produced from cattle fed genetically modified crops.Consumer/Household Economics, Demand and Price Analysis,

Asset pricing with utility from external anticipation

We show that augmenting household's preferences with utility from anticipation of external factors significantly improves the performance of the consumption-based asset pricing model. Specifically, our predictions match the realized returns on equity and on risk-free assets and helps in explaining the observed equity premium volatility. This is due to the novel forward-looking component of preferences exerting an effect on households' decision that countervails the standard market incentives to invest. Our findings stem from simulating the model with different data frequencies and confidence indicators as proxies for external anticipation. The model rationalizes the conventional wisdom that confidence makes households feel richer, hence willing to consume more. Our results also suggest that the observed predictive power of confidence on consumption growth might be justified by anticipatory utility

Information Presentation in Spoken Dialogue Systems

To tackle the problem of presenting a large number of options in spoken dialogue systems, we identify compelling options based on a model of user preferences, and present tradeoffs between alternative options explicitly. Multiple attractive options are structured such that the user can gradually refine her request to find the optimal tradeoff. We show that our approach presents complex tradeoffs understandably, increases overall user satisfaction, and significantly improves the user's overview of the available options. Moreover, our results suggest that presenting users with a brief summary of the irrelevant options increases users' confidence in having heard about all relevant options

"Euclidean Revealed Preferences: Testing the Spatial Voting Model"

In the spatial model of voting, voters choose the candidate closest to them in the ideological space. Recent work by (Degan and Merlo 2009) shows that it is falsifiable on the basis of individual voting data in multiple elections. We show how to tackle the fact that the model only partially identifies the distribution of voting profiles and we give a formal revealed preference test of the spatial voting model in 3 national elections in the US, and strongly reject the spatial model in all cases. We also construct confidence regions for partially identified voter characteristics in an augmented model with unobserved valence dimension, and identify the amount of voter heterogeneity necessary to reconcile the data with spatial preferences.

Consumer Preferences for U.S. Pork in Urban China

China’s transition into a developed economy is driving changes in consumer preferences and demand for foods. To evaluate consumer preferences for U.S. pork in urban China, primary data were collected in two metropolitan areas- Beijing and Shanghai. Estimated logit models revealed that an individual’s age, shopping location and food safety concerns significantly influenced their willingness-to-pay for U.S. pork. A proportional linear model was developed to evaluate factors affecting purchasing behavior of western-style pork cuts vs. traditional Chinese cuts. Food safety concerns were linked to a previous lean-meat additive scare and a lack of consumer confidence on the Chinese food inspection system.China, U.S. Pork, Willingness-to-pay, Ordered Logit, food safety, Agricultural and Food Policy, Consumer/Household Economics, Marketing, D120, D190, M390, Q130, Q180,

New Zealand Labour Supply from 1991-2001: an analysis based on a discrete choice structural utility model

This paper presents results for four separately estimated sets of discrete choice labour supply models using the Household Economic Surveys from 1991/92 up to 2000/01. The New Zealand working-age population is divided into sole parents, single men, single women, and couples. The labour supply models use imputed wages for the non-workers. Some of the preference parameters for work and income are made dependent on personal and household characteristics to allow for heterogeneity in preferences among households. In addition, allowance is made for unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. The estimated parameters for the different groups are used to calculate confidence intervals for expected labour supply and the probability of working at the different discrete hours points. The effect of particular characteristics on labour supply is illustrated by computing marginal effects across the samples. The wage elasticities fall within the range of values found in other studies. Expected labour supply, predicted by using the estimated models, results in values close to the observed averages and confidence intervals around the expected values are reasonably narrow in most groups. The results are as anticipated and similar to results in other countries, with preferences for work being higher for people with higher education, who are in their thirties. Furthermore, for women the presence of young children decreases the preference for work. In addition to these variables, which are usually included in labour supply models, the “eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation†indicator and a “living with parents†indicator are included. For all groups, the delayed eligibility for the state provided superannuation scheme is found to increase labour supply. The indicator for living with one’s parents is found to increase labour supply for sole parents (indicating that living with one’s parents may be a childcare strategy), although the effect was not significant.New Zealand labour supply; discrete choice labour supply model; simulated maximum likelihood; simulated confidence intervals

Time--consistent investment under model uncertainty: the robust forward criteria

We combine forward investment performance processes and ambiguity averse portfolio selection. We introduce the notion of robust forward criteria which addresses the issues of ambiguity in model specification and in preferences and investment horizon specification. It describes the evolution of time-consistent ambiguity averse preferences. We first focus on establishing dual characterizations of the robust forward criteria. This offers various advantages as the dual problem amounts to a search for an infimum whereas the primal problem features a saddle-point. Our approach is based on ideas developed in Schied (2007) and Zitkovic (2009). We then study in detail non-volatile criteria. In particular, we solve explicitly the example of an investor who starts with a logarithmic utility and applies a quadratic penalty function. The investor builds a dynamical estimate of the market price of risk $\hat \lambda$ and updates her stochastic utility in accordance with the so-perceived elapsed market opportunities. We show that this leads to a time-consistent optimal investment policy given by a fractional Kelly strategy associated with $\hat \lambda$. The leverage is proportional to the investor's confidence in her estimate $\hat \lambda$

New Zealand Labour Supply from 1991-2001: An Analysis Based on a Discrete Choice Structural Utility Model

This paper presents results for four separately estimated sets of discrete choice labour supply models using the Household Economic Surveys from 1991/92 up to 2000/01. The New Zealand working-age population is divided into sole parents, single men, single women, and couples. The labour supply models use imputed wages for the non-workers. Some of the preference parameters for work and income are made dependent on personal and household characteristics to allow for heterogeneity in preferences among households. In addition, allowance is made for unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. The estimated parameters for the different groups are used to calculate confidence intervals for expected labour supply and the probability of working at the different discrete hours points. The effect of particular characteristics on labour supply is illustrated by computing marginal effects across the samples. The wage elasticities fall within the range of values found in other studies. Expected labour supply, predicted by using the estimated models, results in values close to the observed averages and confidence intervals around the expected values are reasonably narrow in most groups. The results are as anticipated and similar to results in other countries, with preferences for work being higher for people with higher education, who are in their thirties. Furthermore, for women the presence of young children decreases the preference for work. In addition to these variables, which are usually included in labour supply models, the “eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation” indicator and a “living with parents” indicator are included. For all groups, the delayed eligibility for the state provided superannuation scheme is found to increase labour supply. The indicator for living with one’s parents is found to increase labour supply for sole parents (indicating that living with one’s parents may be a childcare strategy), although the effect was not significant.New Zealand labour supply; discrete choice labour supply model; simulated maximum likelihood; simulated confidence intervals