Abstract:
This paper generalizes the standard habit formation model to an environment in which agents form habits over individual varieties of goods as opposed to over a composite consumption good. We refer to this preference specification as ‘deep habit formation’. Under deep habits, the demand function faced by individual producers depends on past sales. This feature is typically assumed ad-hoc in customer market and brand switching cost models. A central result of the paper is that deep habits give rise to countercyclical markups, which is in line with the empirical evidence. This result is important because ad-hoc formulations of customer-market and switching-cost models have been criticized for implying procyclical and hence counterfactual markup movements. The paper also provides econometric estimates of the parameters pertaining to the deep habit model
Related works: Working Paper: Deep Habits (2004) Working Paper: Deep Habits (2004) This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
More papers in 2004 Meeting Papers from Society for Economic Dynamics Address: Society for Economic Dynamics Christian Zimmermann Economic Research Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis PO Box 442 St. Louis MO 63166-0442 USA Contact information at EDIRC. Series data maintained by Christian Zimmermann ().