Download or read book Three Essays on Structural State-dependent Marketing Variables written by Roozbeh Irani Kermani and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation contains three essays. The first essay studies the accuracy of the measurement methods of brand loyalty. Accurately modeling and measuring a brand loyalty parameter can drastically affect the measurement of consumer impacts and welfare in brand-choice models. The most well-known method for brand loyalty estimation uses a households shopping history and accounts for habit formation via a smoothing parameter that represents the weight given to a households recent decisions in comparison to its distant shopping history. In this paper, we introduce a method that is able to estimate time-varying smoothing parameters for heterogeneous households. I use the Nielsen Homescan dataset for the U.S. beer market and calculate this smoothing parameter for American households during the years 2009-2011. My results show that the smoothing parameter varies significantly not only among households but also for a single household over the time, and that this variation is partially explained by observed household characteristics. I then incorporate a brand-loyalty index based on this method into a brand-choice model of the American beer market and show that our method improves the estimation results. To better understand the relationship between variety seeking and brand loyalty and to develop a more accurate brand choice model, the second essay introduces a new index for variety seeking. Consumers tendency to substitute different types of the same product in their baskets or search for ideal bliss point via diversification is generally regarded as variety-seeking behavior, and researchers most often operationalize this concept by observing product-switching behavior from one purchase occasion to another. What all variety-seeking measurement models have in common is that they operationalize this behavior by observing shopping patterns at the brand level. Thus, variety seeking is the negation of brand loyalty. In the second essay, I propose to generalize the operational concept of variety seeking by focusing on the differences among the product attributes that underlie the brand differences. I construct a variety-seeking index that measures variety via relative Euclidian distances in attribute space. Because a brand identifier could therefore be just one of several product attributes, a more traditional definition of variety seeking based only on brands would be a special case of this new, more general, variety-seeking index. My results show that adding this index to the brand choice model enhances the explanatory power of the model and improves estimation and analysis of consumer preferences. In the third essay, I investigate how mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. beer market affect brand loyalty and variety seeking using the two generalized definitions that I propose in the first two essays. More specifically, I propose to examine how brand-loyalty and variety-seeking indexes change before and after two major mergers during a 5-year period (2004-2009) while controlling for a large suite of fixed effects. Therefore, this analysis would enable me, in a qualitative way, to see how merger and acquisition activity affects underlying preferences.