Food consumption, Advertising and Dynamics

拟议研究的目的是更好地理解食品市场中的个人行为，并为寻求改善营养结果的拟议政策干预的潜在影响提供新的证据。我们的重点将放在理解偏好的形式以及哪些因素可能影响偏好的形成。我们将扩展食物选择的经济模型，以反映潜在的非标准行为特征，如习惯和诱惑，我们还将研究广告对决策的影响。为了研究习惯的形成，我们将使用流动人口和儿童及其父母的食品购买信息。我们将研究如何将诱惑和自我控制等行为偏差纳入需求的标准经济模型，并使用人们为当前和未来消费而购买的信息来估计这些模型。我们还将考虑广告对消费者选择的潜在说服效应。最后，我们将利用这些新的需求模型对改变相对价格或成本的改革进行事前政策评估，以研究习惯形成或行为偏差的存在如何影响政策改革的潜在影响。在考虑这些政策反事实时，我们将分析企业行为，考虑企业之间的动态战略互动，以评估对政府政策（如税收）的需求和供给的长期影响。

The aim of the proposed research is to better understand individual behaviour in food markets, and to provide new evidence on the potential impacts of proposed policy interventions that seek to improve nutritional outcomes. Our focus will be on understanding what form preferences take and what factors might influence preference formation. We will extend economic models of food choice to reflect potential non-standard features of behaviour such as habits and temptation and we will also study the effects on decision making of advertising. To study habit formation, we will use food purchasing information on migrants and on children and their parents. We will study how we can incorporate behavioural biases such as temptation and self-control into the standard economic models of demand and use information on purchases people make for immediate and future consumption to estimate these models. We will also allow for potentially persuasive effects of advertising on consumers' choices. Finally, we will use these new models of demand to carry out ex ante policy evaluation of reforms that change relative prices or costs to study how the existence of habits formation or behavioural biases effect the potential impact of policy reform. When considering such policy counterfactuals we will analyse firm behaviour, accounting for dynamic strategic interactions between firms, in order to assess the long run impact on both demand and supply of government policy (such as taxes).