Demand and Welfare Analysis in Discrete Choice Models with Social Interactions
研究了在存在社会互动的二元选择情境中，政策干预的需求和福利效应，发现即使参数设定完全且均衡唯一，仅凭选择数据不足以计算福利，并提出了识别和估计结构参数及福利边界的方法，用肯尼亚蚊帐实验数据验证。
Abstract Many real-life settings of individual choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover effects. This article develops novel empirical tools for analysing demand and welfare effects of policy interventions in binary choice settings with social interactions. Examples include subsidies for health-product adoption and vouchers for attending a high-achieving school. We show that even with fully parametric specifications and unique equilibrium, choice data, that are sufficient for counterfactual demand prediction under interactions, are insufficient for welfare calculations. This is because distinct underlying mechanisms producing the same interaction coefficient can imply different welfare effects and deadweight-loss from a policy intervention. Standard index restrictions imply distribution-free bounds on welfare. We propose ways to identify and consistently estimate the structural parameters and welfare bounds allowing for unobserved group effects that are potentially correlated with observables and are possibly unbounded. We illustrate our results using experimental data on mosquito-net adoption in rural Kenya.