Demand and Welfare Analysis in Discrete Choice Models under Social Interactions

Debopam Bhattacharya, Pascaline Dupas and Shin Kanaya

Cambridge Working Papers in Economics from Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge

Abstract: Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in binary choice settings with social interactions. Examples include subsidies for health-product adoption and vouchers for attending a high-achieving school. We establish the connection between econometrics of large games and Brock-Durlauf-type interaction models, under both I.I.D. and spatially correlated unobservables. We develop new convergence results for associated beliefs and estimates of preference-parameters under increasing-domain spatial asymptotics. Next, we show that even with fully parametric specifications and unique equilibrium, choice data, that are sufficient for counterfactual demand-prediction under interactions, are insufficient for welfare-calculations. This is because distinct underlying mechanisms producing the same interaction coefficient can imply different welfare-effects and deadweight-loss from a policy-intervention. Standard index-restrictions imply distribution-free bounds on welfare. We illustrate our results using experimental data on mosquito-net adoption in rural Kenya.

Date: 2018-04-01
Note: db692
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cam:camdae:1885

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