Consumer Inertia, Choice Dependence, and Learning from Experience in a Repeated Decision Problem
研究了消费者在电话资费实验中如何通过经验学习调整选择，发现消费者能正确匹配资费与使用量，且错误并非永久，但忽略未观测异质性和过去选择的内生性会得出相反结论。
Understanding when and how individuals think about real-life problems is a central question in economics. This paper studies the role of inertia (inattention), state dependence, and learning. The empirical setting is a tariff experiment, when optional measured tariffs for local telephone calls were introduced unanticipatedly. We find that consumers tend to align their choices of tariff and telephone use levels correctly. Despite low potential savings, mistakes are not permanent, as individuals actively engage in tariff switching in order to reduce the monthly cost of telephone service. Ignoring unobservable heterogeneity and the endogeneity of past choices would have reversed these results. © 2014 The President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology