Capturing Consumption Flexibility in Assortment Choice from Scanner Panel Data
利用扫描面板数据，在没有消费信息的情况下，通过模型识别消费灵活性和状态依赖两种行为效应，解释消费者在时间和横向上的分类选择模式，为管理者提供行为洞察。
This study develops and estimates a model to empirically identify two behavioral effects (namely consumption flexibility and state dependence) that may underlie temporal and horizontal assortment choice, using scanner panel data where consumption information is unavailable. The proposed approach permits a consumer's consumption utility to be dependent on previous consumptions, thus capturing state dependence both across purchase occasions and within horizontal assortments. Moreover, consumers' purchase and consumption decisions are modeled at two distinctive and sequentially related stages, which allows for incorporating the effect of consumption flexibility. The model is estimated on scanner panel data of yogurt purchase. It is found that the two captured effects provide strong empirical support with face validity for the temporal and horizontal assortment choice patterns observed in the data. The behavioral insights derived from estimating the proposed model can also be translated into significant managerial implications.