From market shares to consumer types: Duality in differentiated product demand estimation
在差异化产品需求估计中引入离散消费者口味，推导出市场份额与消费者类型之间的对偶关系，并提出一种在消费者类型空间进行匹配的新方法，当产品数量多而消费者类型少时计算效率更高。
SUMMARY A widely applied method for differentiated product demand estimation, introduced by Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes in 1995, is founded on matching observed and theoretical market shares of products. In this paper, we allow for discrete consumer tastes and derive an equivalent matching occurring in the consumer type space. The equivalence between the two formulations expresses a duality between market shares and consumer types. In applications where a large number of products and a small number of consumer types is natural, the dual formulation introduced in this paper is computationally more efficient than the primal. Indeed, simulation exercises show that the dual method can be significantly faster. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.