"The Best Price You'll Ever Get" The 2005 Employee Discount Pricing Promotions in the U.S. Automobile Industry

During the summer of 2005, the Big Three U.S. automobile manufacturers offered a customer promotion that allowed customers to buy new cars at the discounted price formerly offered only to employees. The initial months of the promotion were record sales months for each of the Big Three firms, suggesting that customers thought that the prices offered during the promotions were particularly attractive. In fact, such large rebates had been available before the employee discount promotion that many customers paid higher prices following the introduction of the promotions than they would have in the weeks just before. We hypothesize that the complex nature of auto prices, the fact that prices are negotiated rather than posted, and the fact that buyers do not participate frequently in the market leads customers to rely on "price cues" in evaluating how good current prices are. We argue that the employee discount pricing promotions were price cues, and that customers responded to the promotions as a signal that prices were discounted.

Who Wins the Olympic Games: Economic Development and Medal Totals

This paper examines determinants of Olympic success at the country level. Does the U.S. win its fair share of Olympic medals? Why does China win 6% of the medals even though it has 1/5 of the world's population? We consider the role of population and economic development in determining medal totals from 1960-1996. We also provide out of sample predictions for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

Pain at the pump: The effect of gasoline prices on new and used automobile markets

We estimate the effect of gasoline prices on short-run equilibrium prices and sales of new and used cars of different fuel economies. We find that gasoline prices have larger effects on the prices of used cars than of new cars, but that they have large effects on market shares and sales of new cars. We use our findings to estimate a component of the effect of an environmental tax on gasoline, and to investigate whether consumers are myopic about future gasoline costs when they buy cars

Who is Exposed to Gas Prices? How Gasoline Prices Affect Automobile Manufacturers and Dealerships

Many consumers are keenly aware of gasoline prices, and consumer responses to gasoline prices have been well studied. In this paper, by contrast, we investigate how gasoline prices affect the automobile industry: manufacturers and dealerships. We estimate how changes in gasoline prices affect equilibrium prices and sales of both new and used vehicles of different fuel economies. We investigate the implications of these effects for individual auto manufacturers, taking into account differences in manufacturers' vehicle portfolios. We also investigate effects on manufacturers' affiliated dealership networks, including effects implied by the changes in used vehicle market outcomes

Repairing the Damage: The Effect of Price Expectations on Auto-Repair Price Quotes

In this paper we investigate whether sellers treat consumers differently on the basis of how well-informed consumers appear to be. We implement a large-scale field experiment in which callers request price quotes from automotive repair shops. We show that sellers alter their initial price quotes depending on whether consumers appear to be well-informed, uninformed, or poorly informed about market prices. We find that repair shops quote higher prices to callers who cite a higher expected price. We find that women are quoted higher prices than men when callers signal that they are uninformed about market prices. However, gender differences disappear when callers mention an expected price for the repair. Finally, we find that repair shops are more likely to offer a price concession if asked to do so by a woman than a man

Does the Swiss Car Market Reward Fuel Efficient Cars? Evidence from Hedonic Pricing Regressions, Matching and a Regression Discontinuity Design

To correct market failures due to the presence of negative externalities associated with energy consumption, governments have adopted a variety of policies, including taxes, subsidies, regulations and standards, and information-based policies. For example, labels that clearly convey energy consumption rates, associated costs, and emissions of conventional pollutants and CO2, have been devised and used in the last two decades in several countries. In 2003, Switzerland introduced a system of fuel economy labels, based on grades ranging from A to G, where is A best and G is worst, to assist consumers in making decisions that improve the fleet s fuel economy and lower emissions. We use a dataset documenting all passenger cars approved for sale in Switzerland each year from 2000 to 2011 to answer three key research questions. First, what is the willingness to pay for fuel economy? Second, do Swiss drivers - or Swiss auto importers on their behalf - appear to do a one-to-one tradeoff between car purchase price and savings on fuel costs over the lifetime of the car? Third, does the label have an additional effect on price, all else the same, above and beyond that of fuel efficiency alone? Hedonic pricing regressions that exploit the variation in fuel economy across make-models, and over time within make-models, suggest that there is a (modest) capitalization of fuel economy into car prices. The diesel premium, however, exceeds the future fuel cost savings made possible by diesel cars, even at zero discount rates. An alternate calculation suggests that the fuel economy premium is consistent with a very low discount rate (2.5%). We use a sharp regression discontinuity design (RDD) based on the mechanism used by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy to assign cars to the fuel economy label to see if the label has an independent effect on price, above and beyond that of the fuel economy. The RDD approach estimates the effect to be 6-11%. To broaden the fuel economy range over which we assess the effect of the A label, we also deploy matching estimators, and find that the effect of an A label on car price is approximately 5%