Dynamic price competition in auto insurance brokerage
分析了巴西汽车保险数据，发现约20%保单无经纪佣金、超40%按最高费率出售，静态模型无法解释；为此构建了含搜索和转换成本的动态价格竞争模型，并估计参数、推断经纪人预期收益和投保人转换频率，评估价格上限政策的反事实效果。
Abstract We analyze Brazilian data on auto insurance and document that (a) about 20% of policies are sold without brokerage commission; (b) over 40% are sold at the highest fee allowed; and (c) the remaining contracts are associated with a spread‐out distribution of fees. Static models cannot rationalize these findings. We develop a dynamic model of price competition with search and switching costs that reproduces them. We use the equilibrium structure to estimate the model parameters and infer the brokers' expected earnings, the frequency that insurees switch brokers, and the counterfactual effects of a price ceiling policy.