Measuring Benefits from New Products in Markets with Information Frictions
研究了美国硬盘市场中信息摩擦如何影响消费者从新产品中获得的收益，发现忽略信息摩擦会低估消费者剩余，而减少摩擦有助于消费者更好地享受新产品的好处。
I study how much consumers benefit from new products in markets with information frictions. I analyze new products in the U.S. hard drive market, which is characterized by ample product innovation. Using unique click-stream data, I measure the magnitude of two frictions, category consideration and costly search, and show that both play a crucial role in shaping consumer demand. To estimate consumer surplus from new products, I develop a search model that captures both frictions and propose a novel Bayesian estimation method to recover its parameters. I then show that ignoring information frictions leads researchers to underestimate the consumer surplus from new hard drives because it appears that consumers do not value the combinations of attributes these hard drives offer. Partly eliminating frictions, through marketing efforts or market-wide transparency initiatives, can help consumers to more fully internalize the benefits of new product launches. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4729 .