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Research

Work in Progress

“Peer Networks and Institutional Outcomes: Predictive Insights into US Higher Education”, May, 2023

“Consumer Choice and Basket Purchases: A Product Variety Network Approach”, November, 2023

A basket is a transaction for a set of brands from a cross-category assortment of products, purchased simultaneously by a consumer. A novel effort reveals how markets behave in settings where basket purchase is the norm and likely to play a relevant role in product demand. A shopping basket model of supermarket consumption is developed, where a representative consumer chooses its demand across a discrete choice set of baskets. Recognising the ability of basket purchases to affect independence assumptions of demand over product categories, we instead assume choices are made given an implicit network of relationships between product pairs that is unknown to the researcher. Using point-of-sale data from a major supermarket chain in Portugal, the shopping basket model is then shown to successfully recover these as an asymmetric composite of strategic product relations. Our results reveal important limitations to demand models which study product categories in isolation, a common approach in Empirical Industrial Organisation.

Master's Thesis

“Generics Entry in Competitive Markets with Firm Size Heterogeneity”, July 2021 (supervised by Mark Armstrong)

How does the entry of a generic variety onto an industry change competitive outcomes, when said industry is composed of firms of distinct sizes? Conventional wisdom in competition policy perceives generics primarily as purveyors of increased market competition and consumer welfare gains. I analyse this question and consider the merits of the prevailing view using a product differentiation model, simultaneously integrating the standard settings of Cournot oligopolistic and Chamberlinian monopolistic competition, facing a new challenge from a perfectly competitive generic variety. I find generics entry to have an ambiguous impact along most dimensions of interest to producers and consumers; significant asymmetric and interacting effects based on firm size heterogeneity; consumer welfare opacity from observable market outcomes; and multiple channels for utility effects, both negative and positive. These results have relevant regulatory implications, suggesting a movement from policies aimed at lowering fixed generics entry costs to more active and granular strategies engaging with the consumer preferences, firm types, and product interactions within each targeted industry.