Unobserved Consideration and Consumer Welfare
Abstract
Can welfare effects of price change be identified when consumers' consideration sets are heterogeneous and unobserved? We establish that the welfare distribution is the same functional of structural choice probabilities under stable but limited consideration as under full consideration. The result permits unrestricted income-effects, preference heterogeneity, and dependence between preferences and consideration. Within this class, limited consideration admits a full-consideration representation preserving choice-probabilities and money-metric compensation: consideration/preferences can remain unidentified while demand and welfare are identified. When consideration sets contract as prices rise, the welfare distribution can be bounded using demand and a bound on choice-set attrition.
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BibTeX
@misc{bhattacharya2026unobserved,
title = {{Unobserved Consideration and Consumer Welfare}},
author = {Debopam Bhattacharya and Ryan J. Martin},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2611.07774},
eprint = {2611.07774},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07774},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Unobserved Consideration and Consumer Welfare
AU - Debopam Bhattacharya
AU - Ryan J. Martin
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/05
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2611.07774
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07774
AB - Can welfare effects of price change be identified when consumers' consideration sets are heterogeneous and unobserved? We establish that the welfare distribution is the same functional of structural choice probabilities under stable but limited consideration as under full consideration. The result permits unrestricted income-effects, preference heterogeneity, and dependence between preferences and consideration. Within this class, limited consideration admits a full-consideration representation preserving choice-probabilities and money-metric compensation: consideration/preferences can remain unidentified while demand and welfare are identified. When consideration sets contract as prices rise, the welfare distribution can be bounded using demand and a bound on choice-set attrition.
ER -