Consumers' Activism: The Cottage Cheese Boycott

Saul Lach, Yossi Spiegel and Igal E Hendel

No 10460, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: We study a consumer boycott on cottage cheese that was organized in Israel on Facebook in the summer of 2011 following a steep increase in prices after price controls were lifted in 2006. The boycott led to an immediate decline in prices which remain low until the present day (March 2016). We find that (i) demand at the start of the boycott, at the new low prices, would have been 30% higher but for the boycott, (ii) own price elasticities and especially cross price elasticities increased substantially after the boycott, and (iii) post-boycott prices are substantially below the levels implied by the post-boycott demand elasticities, suggesting that firms lowered prices due to fears of threat of renewed price controls and the boycott spreading to other products.

Keywords: Consumer boycott; Social media; Price elasticities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 L1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com, nep-mfd and nep-mkt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10460 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Consumers' activism: the cottage cheese boycott (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:10460

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10460

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().