Dear all,  

Please join us for the first session of the Applied Statistics Workshop (Gov 3009) this Wednesday, Sept. 5 from 12.00 - 1.30 pm in CGIS Knafel Room 354. Michael Grubb, an Assistant Professor of Applied Economics from the MIT Sloan School of Management will give a presentation entitled "Cellular Service Demand: Biased Beliefs, Learning, and Bill Shock". As always, a light lunch will be provided.

Abstract:  

By April 2013, the FCC's recent bill-shock agreement with cellular carriers requires consumers be notified when exceeding usage allowances. Will the agreement help or hurt consumers? To answer this question, we estimate a model of consumer plan choice, usage, and learning using a panel of cellular bills. Our model predicts that the agreement will lower average consumer welfare by $2 per year because firms will respond by raising monthly fees. Our approach is based on novel evidence that consumers are inattentive to past usage (meaning that bill-shock alerts are informative) and advances structural modeling of demand in situations where multi-part tariffs induce marginal-price uncertainty. Additionally, our model estimates show that an average consumer underestimates both the mean and variance of future calling. These biases cost consumers $42 per year at existing prices. Moreover, absent bias, the bill-shock agreement would have little to no effect.

Note that this work is joint with Matthew Osborne at the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

An up-to-date schedule for the workshop is available at http://www.iq.harvard.edu/events/node/1208.


Best,
Konstantin

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Konstantin Kashin
Ph.D. Candidate in Government
Harvard University

Mobile: 978-844-0538
E-mail: kkashin@fas.harvard.edu
Site: http://www.konstantinkashin.com/