Consumer Shopping Behavior: How Much Do Consumers Save?
利用2006年英国家庭食品购买数据，量化了促销、批量购买、购买自有品牌和选择不同商店四种行为带来的实际与潜在节省，并分析了这些节省如何随人口特征变化，同时指出标准价格指数因忽略这些行为而高估生活成本上升。
This paper documents the potential and actual savings that consumers realize from four particular types of purchasing behavior: purchasing on sale; buying in bulk (at a lower per unit price); buying generic brands; and choosing outlets. How much can and do households save through each of these behaviors? How do these patterns vary with consumer demographics? We use data collected by a marketing firm on all food purchases brought into the home for a large, nationally representative sample of U.K. households in 2006. We are interested in how consumer choice affects the measurement of price changes. In particular, a standard price index based on a fixed basket of goods will overstate the rise in the true cost of living because it does not properly consider sales and bulk purchasing. According to our measures, the extent of this bias might be of the same or even greater magnitude than the better-known substitution and outlet biases.