Journal ArticleDOI
Price Dispersion in an Automobile Insurance Market
Bev Dahlby,Douglas S. West +1 more
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In this paper, the authors found that the price dispersion in automobile insurance in Alberta is based on costly consumer search and that the variance of real premiums decreases with the numberof firms in the market and increases with the real loss cost per car insured and the number of cars insured.Abstract:
From automobile insurance data for Alberta over the period 1974-81, we find thatpremiums are highly correlated across driver classes in a given year, but that premiums for a given driver class are not correlated over a period of more than 5 years. Firms' relative market shares among drivers over age 25 and married males under 25 are inversely related to their deviations from the mean premiums.In these driver classes, the variance of real premiums decreases with the numberof firms in the market and increases with the real loss cost per car insured and the number of cars insured. From these results we conclude that the price dispersion in automobile insurance in Alberta is based on costly consumer search.read more
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Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
TL;DR: The authors empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products-books and CDs-using a data set of over 8,500 price observations collected over a period of 15 months, comparing pricing behavior at 41 Internet and conventional retail outlets.
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Frictionless Commerce? A Comparison of Internet and Conventional Retailers
TL;DR: The authors empirically analyzes the characteristics of the Internet as a channel for two categories of homogeneous products (books and CDs) using a data set of over 4,500 price observations collected over a period of 9 months.
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New Evidence on the Money's Worth of Individual Annuities
Olivia S. Mitchell,Olivia S. Mitchell,James M. Poterba,James M. Poterba,Mark J. Warshawsky,Mark J. Warshawsky +5 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present new information on the expected present discounted value of payouts on individual life annuities, and find that the expected discount has increased over the last decade relative to the initial cost of the annuity.
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Does the Internet Make Markets More Competitive? Evidence from the Life Insurance Industry
Jeffrey R. Brown,Austan Goolsbee +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors provide empirical evidence on how Internet comparison shopping sites affected the prices of life insurance in the 1990s, and suggest that the growth of the Internet has reduced term life prices by 8-15 percent.
Journal ArticleDOI
New Evidence on the Money's Worth of Individual Annuities
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present new information on the expected present discounted value of payouts on individual life annuities, and find that the expected discount has increased over the last decade relative to the initial cost of the annuity.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Elements of Econometrics.
Ian Domowitz,Jan Kmenta +1 more
TL;DR: The Elements of Econometrics as mentioned in this paper is a textbook for upper-level undergraduate and master's degree courses and may usefully serve as a supplement for traditional Ph.D. courses in economics.
Book
Elements of econometrics
TL;DR: The emphasis is on simplification whenever possible, assuming the readers know college algebra and basic calculus, and Jan Kmenta explains all methods within the simplest framework, and generalizations are presented as logical extensions of simple cases.
Journal ArticleDOI
On the economics of information
TL;DR: The primary message from these and other comments made during the panel discussion was the need to probe more deeply into the utility of knowledge for decision-making, to shift priorities toward making data more usable to policy-makers than to collectors and disseminators.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Simple Model of Equilibrium Price Dispersion
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that price dispersion can exist even within the context of a very simple model, where identical buyers with elastic demand curves sample sequentially from a known price distribution, at a fixed cost per observation.