Johannes Kasinger

This paper shows that retailers increase prices in response to organized retail crime. We match store-level crime data to scanner data from the universe of transactions for cannabis retailers in Washington state. Using quasi-experimental variation from robberies and burglaries, we find a 1.7–1.8% price increase at victimized stores and nearby competitors. This rise is not driven by short-to-medium-term demand changes but is consistent with crime-related cost shocks. Effects are larger for independent stores and less concentrated markets. We estimate that crime imposes a 1% “hidden” unit tax on affected stores, implying $30.7 million additional social costs, primarily borne by consumers.

This study investigates shrinkflation—the practice of reducing product size while maintaining or slightly changing prices—in the U.S. retail grocery market. We analyze a decade of retail scanner data to assess the prevalence and patterns of product size changes across various product categories. Our findings show that approximately 1.92% of products have been downsized. When comparing total sales, product downsizing is more than five times as prevalent as upsizing. Product downsizing typically occurs without a corresponding decrease in price and is widespread across product categories. Consequently, consumers end up paying more per unit volume. We further find that consumers are more responsive to price adjustments than to changes in product size. This finding suggests that reducing product sizes is an effective strategy for retailers and manufacturers to increase margins or respond to cost pressures, offering valuable implications for retailers and policymakers.

Models derived from random utility theory represent the workhorse methods to learn about consumer preferences from discrete choice data. However, a large body of literature documents various behavioral patterns that cannot be captured by basic random utility models and require different non-unified adjustments to accommodate these patterns. In this article, we discuss strategies how to apply rational inattention theory—which explains a large variety of such departures—to the analysis of discrete choice among multiple alternatives described along multiple attributes. We first review existing applications that make restrictive belief assumptions to obtain choice probabilities in closed multinomial logit form. We then propose a model that allows for general consumer beliefs and demonstrate its empirical identification. Further, we illustrate how this model naturally motivates stylized empirical results that are hard to reconcile from a random utility perspective.

We test for skewness preferences in a large set of observational panel data on online poker games (n=4,450,585). Each observation refers to a choice between a safe option and a binary risk of winning or losing the game. Our setting offers a real-world choice situation with substantial incentives where probability distributions are simple, transparent, and known to the decision-makers. Individuals reveal a strong and robust preference for skewness, which is inconsistent with expected utility theory. The effect of skewness is most pronounced among experienced and unsuccessful players but remains significant in all subsamples that we investigate, in contrast to the effect of variance.

We study the behavior of duopolistic firms that can obfuscate their prices before competing on price. Obfuscation affects the rational inattentive consumers’ optimal information strategy, which determines the probabilistic demand. Our model advances related models by allowing consumers to update their unrestricted prior beliefs with an informative signal of any form. We show that the game may result in an obfuscation equilibrium with high prices or a transparency equilibrium with low prices and no obfuscation, providing an argument for market regulation. Obfuscation equilibria cease to exist for low information costs and if one firm seems a priori considerably more attractive.

We estimate the causal effect of shared e-scooter services on traffic accidents by exploiting the variation in the availability of e-scooter services induced by the staggered rollout across 93 cities in six countries. Police-reported accidents involving personal injuries in the average month increased by around 8.2% after shared e-scooters were introduced. Effects are large during summer and insignificant during winter. Further heterogeneity analysis reveals the largest estimated effects for cities with limited cycling infrastructure, while no effects are detectable in cities with high bike-lane density. This difference suggests that public policy can play a crucial role in mitigating accidents related to e-scooters and, more generally, to changes in urban mobility.

This paper examines how firms respond to corrective sin taxes when they can adjust both prices and price presentation, using evidence from the introduction of such a tax in the German online sports betting market. I document that, following the reform, most—but not all—firms strategically shroud the tax by excluding the surcharge from posted prices and adding it later in the transaction, a form of drip pricing. This disclosure choice segments a previously homogeneous market into shrouding and non-shrouding firms. Using a novel panel data set of online betting odds and a difference-in-differences design, I estimate the pass-through of the tax to consumer prices. On average, consumers bear 76% of the tax burden. Pass-through varies substantially and persistently by shrouding practices: firms that shroud the tax pass through about 90%, whereas firms that post tax-inclusive prices pass through only about 16%. The estimated heterogeneity is consistent with an oligopolistic price competition model in which firms choose whether to shroud taxes on top of a salient base price and consumers differ in attention to non-salient surcharges. In the model, shrouding can arise in equilibrium only if some consumers underreact to additive taxes. The findings imply that endogenous shrouding attenuates the corrective effect of the sin tax while allowing firms to sustain higher profits through consumer inattention.

Financial literacy affects wealth accumulation, and pension planning plays a key role in this relationship. In a large field experiment, we employ a digital pension aggregation tool to confront a treatment group with a simplified overview of their current pension claims across all pillars of the pension system. We combine survey and administrative bank data to measure the effects on actual saving behavior. Access to the tool decreases pension uncertainty for treated individuals. Average savings increase—especially for the financially less literate. We conclude that simplification of pension information can potentially reduce disparities in pension planning and savings behavior.