Speaker:Yanfei Wang
Abstract: This paper develops and estimates a structural model of consumer demand for movies in which consumers are heterogeneous in their preferences and choice sets over movies. Consumers are heterogeneous in their choice sets because they do not consider the movies watched in the past as relevant choices contemporarily. The main finding of this study is that consumers prefer movies with lower prices, more showing screens, shorter time gap from releasing week and with time slot in holiday. We employ our model to analyze the import liberalization for U.S. movies to China since 2012. Counterfactual experiments show that consumer welfare increases by 22.31% due to the import liberalization. However, the import liberalization reduces the average market share of the other foreign movies more than that of domestic movies. Finally, if the heterogeneous choice sets across consumers are ignored, we show that there are biases in demand estimates and welfare effectsin counterfactual experiment.

About Yanfei Wang: She is an assistant professor at International School of Economics and Management of Capital University of Economics and Business. She finished her doctor degree at Boston University. Her research interest includes industrial organization, health economics and applied econometrics.

Date: Sep, 22th,2016

Time: 16:10-17:30 PM

Location: Room 608, Academic Hall, CUFE