From Income Distributions to Product Quality Distributions in Competitive Markets
2013/10/15
研討會日期 : 2013-10-15
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Chien-Fu Chou
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Chien-Fu Chou received his Ph.D. in Economics from University of Yale in 1984. He is currently Professor of Economics at National Taiwan University. His research fields are the Microeconomics and Industrial Organization.
演講摘要 : Starting with a utility function with indivisible quality goods as in Gabszewicz and Thisse (1979), we derive a consumer’s quality demand as a function of income in a competitive market framework. Given that consumers’ income distribution is lognormal ln I ∼ N(μ, 2), for a fixed quality demand function we derive the mode bifurcation curve which divides μ-2 space into regimes with different number of quality distribution modes. For the example of income elasticity proportional to 1 − Q, where quality Q < 1, the quality distributions belong to the SB family of distributions in Johnson (1949). It is bimodal if the dispersion coefficient 2 is sufficiently high and |μ| is small relative to 2. Otherwise it is unimodal. We estimate the SB distribution parameters using the 2004 U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey data from Krueger and Perri (2006). The MLE result shows that in the U.S. the housing service quality distribution is unimodal.
