Empirical properties of diversion ratios Conlon, Christopher; Mortimer, Julie Holland
The Rand journal of economics,
12/2021, Volume:
52, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The diversion ratio for products j and k is the fraction of consumers who leave product j after a price increase and switch to product k. Theoretically, it is expressed as the ratio of demand ...derivatives from a multi-product firm's Bertrand-Nash first-order condition. In practice, diversion ratios are also measured from second-choice data or customer-switching surveys. We establish a LATE interpretation of diversion ratios, and show how diversion ratios are obtained from different interventions (price, quality, or assortment changes) and how those measures relate to one another and to underlying properties of demand.
Digitization has transformed how users find and use copyrighted goods, but many existing legal options remain difficult to access, possibly leading to infringement. In a field experiment, we contact ...firms that are caught infringing on expensive digital images. E‐mails to all firms include a link to the licensing page of the infringed image; for treated firms, we add links to a significantly cheaper licensing option. Making infringers aware of the cheaper option leads to a 14‐fold increase in the ex‐post licensing rate, albeit from an extremely low baseline for the control firms. Two additional experimental interventions, designed to reduce search costs for (i) price and (ii) product information, also have large positive effects. Our results suggest that ex‐post monetization (e.g., licensing after use) may expand the market, and that rights holders can create value by minimizing search and transactions costs.
In many industries, upstream manufacturers pay downstream retailers for achieving quantity or market share targets. These “vertical rebates” may mitigate downstream moral hazard by inducing greater ...retail effort but may also incentivize retailers to drop competing products. We study these offsetting effects empirically for a rebate paid to one retailer. Using a field experiment, we exogenously vary the outcome of retailer effort. We estimate models of consumer choice and retailer behavior to quantify the rebate’s effect on retail assortment and effort. We find that the rebate is designed to exclude a competing product and fails to maximize social surplus.
Pharmacotherapy is often used to target symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but does not provide definitive treatment, and side effects of daily medication are often problematic. ...Trauma-focused psychotherapies are more likely than drug treatment to achieve PTSD remission, but have high dropout rates and ineffective for a large percentage of patients. Therefore, research into drugs that might increase the effectiveness of psychotherapy is a logical avenue of investigation. The most promising drug studied as a catalyst to psychotherapy for PTSD thus far is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA), commonly known as the recreational drug “Ecstasy.” MDMA stimulates the release of hormones and neurochemicals that affect key brain areas for emotion and memory processing. A series of recently completed phase 2 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for treatment of PTSD show favorable safety outcomes and large effect sizes that warrant expansion into multi-site phase 3 trials, set to commence in 2018. The nonprofit sponsor of the MDMA drug development program, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), is supporting these trials to explore whether MDMA, administered on only a few occasions, can increase the effectiveness of psychotherapy. Brain imaging techniques and animal models of fear extinction are elucidating neural mechanisms underlying the robust effects of MDMA on psychological processing; however, much remains to be learned about the complexities of MDMA effects as well as the complexities of PTSD itself.
In a contemporary business environment where change is often regarded as continuous, the ability of people or organizations to be able to successfully adapt and respond to change is key. Change often ...involves not only the learning of new behaviours, ideas, or practices but also giving up or abandoning some established ones. Despite both these elements generally being important to change, academic focus on processes of abandoning or giving up established knowledge and practices, that is, unlearning, is lacking. This conceptual article draws on a range of literature to suggest that the process of individual unlearning may have particular features. The review defines the concept of unlearning, differentiates between two different types of individual unlearning, and suggests that each type of individual unlearning may have its own distinctive features and dynamics. This article builds from this insight through developing a typology, which distinguishes between four types of individual unlearning. It concludes with an agenda for future empirical research to examine and validate the concepts presented.
Digital technologies for sharing creative goods create new opportunities for copyright infringement and challenge established enforcement methods. We establish several important facts about the ...nature of copyright infringement and efforts to settle past infringing use in the market for digital images. Infringement in this, and many other markets, is often uninformed: users may be unaware that their use infringes, and may lack information about the price of a license. The uninformed nature of infringement implies that price may not be the primary factor in the decision to settle past use; in contrast, non-price factors may significantly affect settlement outcomes.
Incomplete product availability is an important feature of many markets, and ignoring changes in availability may bias demand estimates. We study a new dataset from a wireless inventory system on ...vending machines to track product availability every four hours. The data allow us to account for product availability when estimating demand, and provide valuable variation for identifying substitution patterns when products stock out. We develop a procedure that allows for changes in product availability when availability is only observed periodically. We find significant differences in demand estimates: the corrected model predicts significantly larger impacts of stock-out events on profitability.
Objective:
Stroke and traumatic brain injury (TBI) are among the leading causes of disability. Even after engaging in rehabilitation, nearly half of patients with severe TBI requiring hospitalization ...are left with major disability. Despite decades of investigation, pharmacologic treatment of brain injury is still a field in its infancy. Recent clinical trials have begun into the use of psychedelic therapeutics for treatment of brain injury. This brief review aims to summarize the current state of the science's relevance to neurorehabilitation, and may act as a resource for those seeking to understand the precedence for these ongoing clinical trials.
Methods:
Narrative mini-review of studies published related to psychedelic therapeutics and brain injury.
Results:
Recent
in vitro, in vivo
, and case report studies suggest psychedelic pharmacotherapies may influence the future of brain injury treatment through modulation of neuroinflammation, hippocampal neurogenesis, neuroplasticity, and brain complexity.
Conclusions:
Historical data on the safety of some of these substances could serve in effect as phase 0 and phase I studies. Further phase II trials will illuminate how these drugs may treat brain injury, particularly TBI and reperfusion injury from stroke.
Bundling is at the forefront of many policy debates as new technologies allow firms to implement more complex bundling arrangements. Realistic analyses of bundling—particularly between suppliers and ...retailers—require detailed data on both supply arrangements and consumer demand. We analyze firms' use of bundling as a vertical restraint (known as full-line forcing) using extensive supply and demand data from the video rental industry. Our model captures key details of the market that determine firms' contractual choices, and sheds light on the implications of these decisions. The empirical approach provides a model for how to analyze bundling when detailed data are available.
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