Working Paper: NBER ID: w12425
Authors: Patrick Bajari; Jeremy T. Fox; Stephen Ryan
Abstract: The US mobile phone service industry has dramatically consolidated over the last two decades. One justification for consolidation is that merged firms can provide consumers with larger coverage areas at lower costs. We estimate the willingness to pay for national coverage to evaluate this motivation for past consolidation. As market level quantity data is not publicly available, we devise an econometric procedure that allows us to estimate the willingness to pay using market share ranks collected from a popular online retailer, Amazon. Our semiparametric maximum score estimator controls for consumers' heterogeneous preferences for carriers, handsets and minutes of calling time. We find that national coverage is strongly valued by consumers, providing an efficiency justification for across-market mergers. The methods we propose can estimate demand for other products using data from Amazon or other online retailers where quantities are not observed, but product ranks are observed. Since Amazon data can easily be gathered by researchers, these methods may be useful for the analysis of other product markets where high quality data are not publicly available.
Keywords: Wireless Carrier Consolidation; Demand Estimation; Consumer Willingness to Pay
JEL Codes: L1; C1
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| national coverage (I13) | consumer utility (D11) |
| national coverage (I13) | willingness to pay (D11) |
| willingness to pay (D11) | consumer utility (D11) |
| national coverage (I13) | market share ranks (L17) |
| market share ranks (L17) | consumer utility (D11) |