Demand Estimation with Heterogeneous Consumers and Unobserved Product Characteristics: A Hedonic Approach

61 Pages Posted: 1 Feb 2012

See all articles by C. Lanier Benkard

C. Lanier Benkard

Stanford Graduate School of Business; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Patrick Bajari

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Economics; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Multiple version iconThere are 5 versions of this paper

Date Written: July 2001

Abstract

We study the identification and estimation of preferences in hedonic discrete choice models of demand for differentiated products. In the hedonic discrete choice model, products are represented as a finite dimensional bundle of characteristics, and consumers maximize utility subject to a budget constraint. Our hedonic model also incorporates product characteristics that are observed by consumers but not by the economist. We demonstrate that, unlike the case where all product characteristics are observed, it is not in general possible to uniquely recover consumer preferences from data on a consumer's choices. However, we provide several sets of assumptions under which preferences can be recovered uniquely, that we think may be satisfied in many applications. Our identification and estimation strategy is a two stage approach in the spirit of Rosen (1974). In the first stage, we show under some weak conditions that price data can be used to nonparametrically recover the unobserved product characteristics and the hedonic pricing function. In the second stage, we show under some weak conditions that if the product space is continuous and the functional form of utility is known, then there exists an inversion between a consumer's choices and her preference parameters. If the product space is discrete, we propose a Gibbs sampling algorithm to simulate the population distribution of consumers' taste coefficients.

Suggested Citation

Benkard, C. Lanier and Bajari, Patrick, Demand Estimation with Heterogeneous Consumers and Unobserved Product Characteristics: A Hedonic Approach (July 2001). NBER Working Paper No. t0272, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1996961

C. Lanier Benkard (Contact Author)

Stanford Graduate School of Business ( email )

Stanford, CA 94305-5015
United States
650-723-4124 (Phone)
650-725-0468 (Fax)

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Patrick Bajari

University of Michigan at Ann Arbor - Department of Economics ( email )

611 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
United States
734-763-5319 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~bajari/

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

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