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Valuation of New Goods under Perfect and Imperfect Competition

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  • Jerry A. Hausman
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    Abstract

    The Consumer Price Index (CPI) attempts to answer the question of how much more (or less) income does a consumer require to be as well off in period 1 as in period 0 given changes in prices, changes in the quality of goods, and the introduction of new goods (or the disappearance of existing goods). In this paper I explain the theory of cost-of-living indices and demonstrate how new goods should be included using the classical theory of Hicks and Rothbarth. The correct price to use for the good in the pre-intro- duction period is a `virtual' price which sets demand to zero. Estimation of this virtual price requires estimation of a demand function which in turn provides the expenditure function which allows exact calucation of the cost of living index. The data requirements and need to specify and estimate a demand function for a new brand among many existing brands requires extensive data and some new econometric methods which may have proven obstacles to the inclusion of new goods in the CPI up to this point. As an example I use the introduction of a new cereal brand by General Mills in 1989-Apple Cinnamon Cheerios. I find the virtual price is about 2 times the actual price of Apple Cinnamon Cheerios and that increase in consumer surplus is substantial. Based on some simplifying approximations, I find that CPI may be overstated for cereal by about 25% because of its neglect of the effect of new brands. When I take imperfect competition into account I find that the increase in consumer welfare is only 85% as high with perfect competition so CPI for cereal would still be 20% too high

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    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w4970.pdf
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    Bibliographic Info

    Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 4970.

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    Date of creation: Dec 1994
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    Publication status: published as Jerry A. Hausman. "Valuation of New Goods under Perfect and Imperfect Competition," in Timothy F. Bresnahan and Robert J. Gordon, editors, "The Economics of New Goods" University of Chicago Press (1997)
    Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:4970

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    References

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    Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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    1. Hausman, Jerry A., 1980. "The effect of wages, taxes, and fixed costs on women's labor force participation," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 161-194, October.
    2. Kenneth L. Judd, 1985. "Credible Spatial Preemption," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 16(2), pages 153-166, Summer.
    3. G. Burtless & J. A. Hausman, 1977. "The Effect of Taxation on Labor Supply: Evaluating the Gary Negative Income Tax Experiment," Working papers 211, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Economics.
    4. Jerry HAUSMAN & Gregory LEONARD & J. Douglas ZONA, 1994. "Competitive Analysis with Differentiated Products," Annales d'Economie et de Statistique, ENSAE, issue 34, pages 159-180.
    5. Hausman, Jerry A. & Taylor, William E., 1981. "Panel data and unobservable individual effects," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 155-155, May.
    6. Hausman, Jerry A & Taylor, William E, 1981. "Panel Data and Unobservable Individual Effects," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(6), pages 1377-98, November.
    7. Breusch, Trevor S & Mizon, Grayham E & Schmidt, Peter, 1989. "Efficient Estimation Using Panel Data," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 57(3), pages 695-700, May.
    8. Feenstra, Robert C, 1994. "New Product Varieties and the Measurement of International Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(1), pages 157-77, March.
    9. Diewert, W.E., 1992. "Essays in Index Number theory : An Overview of Volume 1," UBC Departmental Archives 92-31, UBC Department of Economics.
    10. Neary, J.P & Roberts, K.W.S, 1978. "The Theory of Household Behaviour under Rationing," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 132, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    11. Dixit, Avinash K & Stiglitz, Joseph E, 1975. "Monopolistic Competition and Optimum Product Diversity," The Warwick Economics Research Paper Series (TWERPS) 64, University of Warwick, Department of Economics.
    12. Hausman, Jerry A, 1978. "Specification Tests in Econometrics," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(6), pages 1251-71, November.
    13. Hausman, Jerry A, 1981. "Exact Consumer's Surplus and Deadweight Loss," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 71(4), pages 662-76, September.
    14. Deaton,Angus & Muellbauer,John, 1980. "Economics and Consumer Behavior," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521296762.
    15. Jerry A. Hausman, 1980. "The effect of wages, taxes, and fixed costs on women's labor force participation," NBER Chapters, in: Econometric Studies in Public Finance, pages 161-194 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
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    Blog mentions

    As found by EconAcademics.org, the blog aggregator for Economics research:
    1. The welfare effect of Apple-Cinnamon Cheerios
      by datacharmer in bluematter on 2007-09-25 00:05:00
    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
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    Cited by:
    1. Timothy F. Bresnahan & Scott Stern & Manuel Trajtenberg, 1995. "Market Segmentation and the Sources of Rents from Innovation: Personal Computers in the Late 1980s," Working Papers 95001, Stanford University, Department of Economics.
    2. W. Erwin Diewert, 1995. "Price and Volume Measures in the System of National Accounts," NBER Working Papers 5103, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    3. Anindya Ghose & Arun Sundararajan, 2006. "Evaluating Pricing Strategy Using e-Commerce Data: Evidence and Estimation Challenges," Papers math/0609170, arXiv.org.
    4. James Binkley & James Eales & Mark Jekanowski & Ryan Dooley, 2001. "Competitive behavior of national brands: The case of orange juice," Agribusiness, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 17(1), pages 139-160.
    5. Nilsson, Tomas K.H. & Foster, Kenneth A., 2005. "Certification of Pork Products," 2005 Annual meeting, July 24-27, Providence, RI 19350, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    6. Peterson, Everett B. & Cotterill, Ronald W., 1998. "Incorporating Flexible Demand Systems in Empirical Models of Market Power," Research Reports 25159, University of Connecticut, Food Marketing Policy Center.
    7. Lukas Mohler, 2009. "Globalization and the Gains from Variety: The Case of a Small Open Economy," FIW Working Paper series 031, FIW.
    8. Mohler, Lukas & Seitz, Michael, 2010. "The Gains from Variety in the European Union," Discussion Papers in Economics 11477, University of Munich, Department of Economics.
    9. Herranz-Loncan, Alfonso, 2011. "The contribution of railways to economic growth in Latin America before 1914: a growth accounting approach," MPRA Paper 33578, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    10. Friberg, Richard & Ganslandt, Mattias, 2006. "An empirical assessment of the welfare effects of reciprocal dumping," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 1-24, September.
    11. Shubham Chaudhuri & Pinelopi K. Goldberg & Panle Jia, 2003. "The Effects of Extending Intellectual Property Rights Protection to Developing Countries: A Case Study of the Indian Pharmaceutical," Discussion Papers 0304-08, Columbia University, Department of Economics.
    12. Panle Gia & Pinelopi K. Goldberg & Shubham Chaudhuri, 2006. "Estimating the Effects of Global Patent Protection in Pharmaceuticals: A Case Study of Quinolones in India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(5), pages 1477-1514, December.

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