Cameron, Trudy Ann

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/3686

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Browsing Cameron, Trudy Ann by Subject "Mathematical and quantitative methods"

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    Eliciting Individual-Specific Discount Rates
    (University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2003-01-01) Cameron, Trudy Ann; Gerdes, Geoffrey R.
    Longstanding debate over the appropriate social discount rate for public projects stems from our lack of knowledge about how individual discount rates vary across people and across choice contexts. Using a sample of roughly 15,000 choices by over 2000 individuals, we estimate utility theoretic models concerning private tradeoffs involving money over time that reveal individual specific discount rates. We control for experimentally differentiated choice scenarios, sociodemographic heterogeneity, and elicitation formats, and complex forms of heteroscedasticity. Statistically significant heterogeneity in discount rates is quantified for both an exponential discounting model and a competing hyperbolic model, but neither specification clearly dominates.
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    Test of Choice Set Misspecification for Discrete Models of Consumer Choice
    (University of Oregon, Dept. of Economics, 2001-11-05) DeShazo, J. R.; Cameron, Trudy Ann; Saenz, Manrique, 1971-
    We develop and evaluate a test of choice set misspecification for a multinomial logit choice model. This test determines whether the choice set designated by the researcher mistakenly assigns relevant substitutes to the numeraire good. We develop this test by generalizing the traditional McFadden-type conditional logit model to evaluate whether the traditional model is conditioned on an overly restrictive set of substitution possibilities. The test has a convenient feature: while it requires information on potentially relevant, but omitted, substitute goods, it does not require the researcher to observe consumers? choices among these omitted potential substitutes if they select the numeraire good (which contains these omitted substitutes). A comparison of the traditional multinomial logit choice model and our more general model suggests that choice set misspecification may produce biased parameters that distort welfare estimates to a consequential extent.