Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 1995, Volume 63, Issue 4

Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium

https://doi.org/0012-9682(199507)63:4<841:APIME>2.0.CO;2-U
p. 841-890

Ariel Pakes, James Levinsohn, Steven Berry

This paper develops techniques for empirically analyzing demand and supply in differentiated products markets and then applies these techniques to analyze equilibrium in the U.S. automobile industry. Our primary goal is to present a framework which enables one to obtain estimates of demand and cost parameters for a class of oligopolistic differentiated products markets. These estimates can be obtained using only widely available product-level and aggregate consumer-level data, and they are consistent with a structural model of equilibrium in an oligopolistic industry. When we apply the techniques developed here to the U.S. automobile market, we obtain cost and demand parameters for (essentially) all models marketed over a twenty year period.


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