Delayed Effect Zone

On the territory of the Russian Federation there are sixty-four closed educational institutions for children, of which three are for girls. The overall number of child-prisoners in 2000 was 34,000, and in 2003—27,500.     

DEMAND FOR DIFFERENTIATED DURABLE PRODUCTS: THE CASE OF THE U.S. COMPUTER PRINTER MARKET

This paper develops an estimation technique for analyzing the impact of technological change on the dynamics of consumer demand in a differentiated durable products industry. The paper presents a dynamic model of consumer demand for differentiated durable products that explicitly accounts for consumers' expectations of future product quality and consumers' outflow from the market that arises endogenously from their purchase decisions. The timing of consumers' purchases is formalized as an optimal stopping problem. A solution to that problem defines the hazard rate of product adoptions, while the nested discrete choice model determines the alternative‐specific purchase probabilities. Integrating individual decisions over the population distribution generates rich dynamics of aggregate and product‐level sales. The empirical part of the paper applies the model to data on the U.S. computer printer market for 1998–1999. The estimates support the hypothesis of consumers' forward‐looking behavior, allowing for better demand forecasts and improved measures of welfare gains from introducing new products. (JEL L11, C35, D91)     

POSTED OFFER MARKETS IN NEAR-CONTINUOUS TIME: AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION

This paper reports an experiment conducted to evaluate a "near-continuous" variant of the posted offer trading institution, where the number of periods in a market session is increased by reducing sharply each period's maximum length. Experimental results suggest that although decisions in time-truncated periods are not equivalent to periods of longer duration, extensive repetition improves considerably the drawing power of equilibrium predictions in some challenging environments. Nevertheless, significant deviations remain in the near-continuous framework. We also observe that the extra data collected in the near-continuous framework allow new insights into price convergence and signaling . ( JEL C92, L12, L11)