ESSAYS ON CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AND DEMAND ANALYSIS: FOOD QUALITY, NON-MARKET GOODS, AND HABIT PERSISTENCE
Open Access
- Author:
- Yu, Xiaohua
- Graduate Program:
- Agricultural Economics and Demography
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- November 21, 2008
- Committee Members:
- David Gerard Abler, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
David Gerard Abler, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jill Leslie Findeis, Committee Member
Richard C Ready, Committee Member
Ruilin Zhou, Committee Member - Keywords:
- Air Quality
Food Quality
Alcohol and Cigarettes
Non-Market Goods
Habit-Persistence
China
Consumer Behavior - Abstract:
- This dissertation consists of three essays on consumer behavior and demand analysis. The three essays incorporate quality variation, non-market goods and habit-persistence, respectively, into the framework of traditional consumer behavior analysis from a theoretical perspective. The essays also use data from China to empirically analyze the demand for food quality, environmental quality, and alcohol and cigarettes in China. Essay 1 develops a theoretical framework to calculate the biases in income and price elasticities when unit values are used as prices in demand analysis, because unit values reflect not only prices but also information about product quality. The theory is applied in order to calculate corrected income and price elasticities for the demand for food in rural China, starting with elasticity estimates from the current literature. Essay 2 develops a four-hurdle model, which is a limited information econometric model, to deal with zero bids and missing responses in open-ended bidding for contingent valuation methods of non-market goods. The model is used to analyze the willingness to pay for blue skies in Beijing through the government’s Duststorm Sources Control Project. Essay 3 constructs a habit-persistence model and uses a panel dataset to apply the model to the study addictive behavior, in particular, the interactions between alcohol and cigarette consumption in rural China.