"Customer Capital: Theory and Evidence"

《客户资本：理论与证据》

• 批准号: 1024739
• 负责人: Leena Rudanko
• 金额: $ 22.76万
• 依托单位: Trustees of Boston University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2010
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2010-09-01 至 2013-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1024739&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Customer; Capital; Theory; Evidence

This award funds development of a macroeconomic model that incorporates frictions arising from consumer search for information about product characteristics.Firms spend substantial resources on marketing and sales costs. These expenses are evidence of frictions in product markets; firms must spend money to attract new consumers. These frictions imply that customers tend to remain with the same firm for some time. Therefore, a firm can view its existing customer base as 'customer capital', a valuable firm asset. This research examines the implications of this kind of market friction and customer capital for macroeconomics. The investigators develop a simple and parsimonious general equilbrium model incorporating this search theory based customer capital. They then analyze the model to answer three different questions. First, they demonstrate that firm-level investment behavior depends on these customer based product frictions. Second, this kind of market friction results in more accurate predictions of macroeconomic time series. For example, the hump shaped responses of macroeconomic aggregates to total factor productivity (TFP) shocks result because firm expansion is slowed down by the expense of attracting new customers. Incorporating product market frictions also means that the model demonstrates how a news shock can generate an economic expansion as firms build up their customer base in advance of increased productivity.Third, the model provides a new tractable framework for analyzing both firm price-setting decisions and markups. Concerns about maintaining the costemr-base make prices insensitive to firm-specific cost shoks, as well as somewhat insensitive to aggregate cost shocks. Finally, customer capital explains the value premium widely documented in financial markets. Firms with more customer capital may have lower systematic risk, thanks to the flexibility of customer capital.This project incorporates insights from business management and industrial economics into macroeconomic modeling. The results will be useful for policymakers and forecasters.

该奖项为宏观经济模型的开发提供资金，该模型将消费者搜索有关产品特征的信息所产生的摩擦纳入其中。 这些费用是产品市场摩擦的证据;公司必须花钱吸引新的消费者。 这些摩擦意味着客户倾向于在一段时间内与同一家公司保持联系。 因此，一个公司可以将其现有的客户群视为“客户资本”，一种有价值的公司资产。 本研究探讨了这种市场摩擦和客户资本对宏观经济的影响。 研究者发展了一个简单和简约的一般均衡模型，结合了基于顾客资本的搜寻理论。 然后，他们分析模型来回答三个不同的问题。 首先，他们表明，公司层面的投资行为取决于这些客户为基础的产品摩擦。 其次，这种市场摩擦导致宏观经济时间序列的预测更加准确。 例如，宏观经济总量对全要素生产率（TFP）冲击的驼峰形反应是由于吸引新客户的费用减缓了企业扩张。 消除产品市场摩擦也意味着该模型展示了新闻冲击如何能够产生经济扩张，因为企业在提高生产率之前建立了客户基础。第三，该模型为分析企业定价决策和加价提供了一个新的易于处理的框架。 对维持成本基数的担忧使价格对公司特定成本冲击不敏感，对总成本冲击也有点不敏感。 最后，客户资本解释了金融市场中广泛记载的价值溢价。 由于顾客资本的灵活性，顾客资本越多的企业，系统性风险越低。本课题将企业管理学和产业经济学的观点与宏观经济模型相结合。 研究结果将对决策者和预测者有用。