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Consumers in the U.S. increasingly prefer plant-based milk alternative beverages (abbreviated “plant milk”) to conventional milk. This study is motivated by the need to take into consideration varied nutritional and qualitative attributes in plant milk to examine consumers’ purchasing behavior and estimate demand elasticities which are achieved by a new approach combing hedonic pricing model with Barten’s synthetic demand system. The method of estimation is enlightened from the common practice of companies differentiating their products in multidimensions in terms of attributes. A research dataset was uniquely created by associating the products’ purchase data from Nielsen Homescan dataset with exclusive first-hand nutritional data. Estimations began with creating a multidimensional hedonic attribute space based on the qualitative information of different types of plant milk and conventional milk available to consumers and then calculating the hedonic distances by Euclidean distance measurement to reparametrize Barten’s synthetic demand system. Estimation results showed that the highest own-price elasticity pertained to soy milk which was −0.25. Three plant milk types had inelastic demand. Soy milk exerted substituting effects on all types of conventional milk products and vice versa. Soy milk, rice milk and almond milk entertained complementary relationships between each other and four types of conventional milk were strong substitutes within the group.

This book explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the 18th century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain's urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the 18th century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the 18th century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new desires. This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. This book is built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. The book traces how this new consumer society of the 18th century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialisation itself.

This paper measures the impact of vertically integrated and exclusive software on industry structure and welfare in the sixth-generation of the US video game industry (2000-2005). I specify and estimate a dynamic model of both consumer demand for hardware and software products, and software demand for hardware platforms. I use estimates to simulate market outcomes had platforms been unable to own or contract exclusively with software. Driven by increased software compatibility, hardware and software sales would have increased by 7 percent and 58 percent and consumer welfare by $1.5 billion. Gains would be realized only by the incumbent, suggesting exclusivity favored the entrant platforms.

Meat analogues are gradually moving from niche to mainstream products. These products are gaining popularity due to surging consumer demand for plant-based products as “better for you” and “better for the planet” alternatives. In this frame, this review aimed to provide the current and forthcoming challenges for meat analogues industry by addressing their market growth drivers, formulation, the pros and cons of conventional and innovative processing, safety and healthiness as well as consumers’ perception and acceptance. Despite the significant improvements made in the flavor and texture of plant-based meat analogues, food industries still have difficulties in delivering the right sensory experience and there is increased request for sustainable, nutritious and clean label ingredients. For shaping the future of plant-based meat analogues, the main driver is sustainable nutrition through prompting further improvements in formulation [by enhancing proteins functionally (pre/post-processing) and healthiness (blending plant proteins with tailored nutritional makeup and reducing salt contents)] and processing [by finding solutions to their “processed” and “ultra-processed” nature]. In the future, meat analogue companies will keep pushing the boundaries to mimic meat experience (by improving taste and healthiness) as well as reduce product price and increase product convenience.

Most new consumer durable goods experience rapid prices declines and quality improvements, suggesting the importance of modeling dynamics. This paper specifies a dynamic model of consumer preferences for new durable goods with persistently heterogeneous consumer tastes, rational expectations, and repeat purchases over time. We estimate the model on the digital camcorder industry using panel data on prices, sales, and characteristics. We find that the 1-year elasticity in response to a transitory industrywide price shock is about 25 percent less than the 1-month elasticity. Standard cost-of-living indices overstate welfare gain in later periods due to a changing composition of buyers.

Spurred by the consumer demand for companies to be socially responsible, cause-related marketing (CM), in which fund raising for a cause is tied to purchase of a firm's products, has become popular in recent years. The authors demonstrate the conditions in which CM campaigns that allow consumers to choose the cause that receives the donation lead to greater consumer support than those in which the company determines the cause. They show that choice in this context is helpful as long as it increases consumers' perception of personal role in helping the cause. Specifically, allowing consumers to select the cause in a CM campaign is more likely to enhance perceived personal role and, thus, purchase intentions (1) for those consumers who are high (vs. low) in collectivism and (2) when the company and causes have low (vs. high) perceptual fit. Finally, the authors show that under certain conditions, choice may have a negative impact on perceived personal role and consumer support of CM campaigns.

This paper applies revealed preference theory to the nonparametric statistical analysis of consumer demand. Knowledge of expansion paths is shown to improve the power of nonparametric tests of revealed preference. The tightest bounds on indifference surfaces and welfare measures are derived using an algorithm for which revealed preference conditions are shown to guarantee convergence. Nonparametric Engel curves are used to estimate expansion paths and provide a stochastic structure within which to examine the consistency of household level data and revealed preference theory. An application is made to a long time series of repeated cross-sections from the Family Expenditure Survey for Britain. The consistency of these data with revealed preference theory is examined. For periods of consistency with revealed preference, tight bounds are placed on true cost of living indices.

Meat and milk from ruminants provide an important source of protein and other nutrients for human consumption. Although ruminants have a unique advantage of being able to consume forages and graze lands not suitable for arable cropping, 2% to 12% of the gross energy consumed is converted to enteric CH4 during ruminal digestion, which contributes approximately 6% of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, ruminant producers need to find cost-effective ways to reduce emissions while meeting consumer demand for food. This paper provides a critical review of the substantial amount of ruminant CH4-related research published in past decades, highlighting hydrogen flow in the rumen, the microbiome associated with methanogenesis, current and future prospects for CH4 mitigation and insights into future challenges for science, governments, farmers and associated industries. Methane emission intensity, measured as emissions per unit of meat and milk, has continuously declined over the past decades due to improvements in production efficiency and animal performance, and this trend is expected to continue. However, continued decline in emission intensity will likely be insufficient to offset the rising emissions from increasing demand for animal protein. Thus, decreases in both emission intensity (g CH4/animal product) and absolute emissions (g CH4/day) are needed if the ruminant industries continue to grow. Providing producers with cost-effective options for decreasing CH4 emissions is therefore imperative, yet few cost-effective approaches are currently available. Future abatement may be achieved through animal genetics, vaccine development, early life programming, diet formulation, use of alternative hydrogen sinks, chemical inhibitors and fermentation modifiers. Individually, these strategies are expected to have moderate effects (<20% decrease), with the exception of the experimental inhibitor 3-nitrooxypropanol for which decreases in CH4 have consistently been greater (20% to 40% decrease). Therefore, it will be necessary to combine strategies to attain the sizable reduction in CH4 needed, but further research is required to determine whether combining anti-methanogenic strategies will have consistent additive effects. It is also not clear whether a decrease in CH4 production leads to consistent improved animal performance, information that will be necessary for adoption by producers. Major constraints for decreasing global enteric CH4 emissions from ruminants are continued expansion of the industry, the cost of mitigation, the difficulty of applying mitigation strategies to grazing ruminants, the inconsistent effects on animal performance and the paucity of information on animal health, reproduction, product quality, cost-benefit, safety and consumer acceptance.

How much income would a woman living alone require to attain the same standard of living that she would have if she were married? What percentage of a married couple's expenditures are controlled by the husband? How much money does a couple save on consumption goods by living together versus living apart? We propose and estimate a collective model of household behaviour that permits identification and estimation of concepts such as these. We model households in terms of the utility functions of its members, a bargaining or social welfare function, and a consumption technology function. We demonstrate generic non-parametric identification of the model, and hence of a version of adult equivalence scales that we call \"indifference scales\", as well as consumption economies of scale, the household's resource sharing rule or members' bargaining power, and other related concepts.

We leverage the newly emerging business analytical capability to rapidly deploy and iterate large-scale, microlevel, in vivo randomized experiments to understand how social influence in networks impacts consumer demand. Understanding peer influence is critical to estimating product demand and diffusion, creating effective viral marketing, and designing \"network interventions\" to promote positive social change. But several statistical challenges make it difficult to econometrically identify peer influence in networks. Though some recent studies use experiments to identify influence, they have not investigated the social or structural conditions under which influence is strongest. By randomly manipulating messages sent by adopters of a Facebook application to their 1.3 million peers, we identify the moderating effect of tie strength and structural embeddedness on the strength of peer influence. We find that both embeddedness and tie strength increase influence. However, the amount of physical interaction between friends, measured by coappearance in photos, does not have an effect. This work presents some of the first large-scale in vivo experimental evidence investigating the social and structural moderators of peer influence in networks. The methods and results could enable more effective marketing strategies and social policy built around a new understanding of how social structure and peer influence spread behaviors in society. This paper was accepted by Alok Gupta, special issue on business analytics .