Dealer Price Discrimination in New Car Purchases: Evidence from the Consumer Expenditure Survey
利用消费者支出调查的交易价格数据，发现经销商折扣主要受车型、市场和交易特征影响，而非消费者个人特征，且与早期实验发现的种族和性别歧视结论相矛盾，但少数族裔的折扣分布更分散。
This paper documents the variation in dealer discounts for new cars using transactions price data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Consumer-specific characteristics fail to explain dealer discounts, whereas model, market-specific, and purchase transaction variables (e.g., first-time purchase, trade-in, and financing through dealer) do explain them. The results contradict earlier findings of race and gender discrimination based on a controlled experiment. This contradiction is reconciled by examining the higher moments of the empirical discount distribution; while mean and median markups do not vary by race and gender, minority purchases are characterized by higher dispersion. Copyright 1996 by University of Chicago Press.