Case Article—The RealPro Customer Benefits Program: Rekindling Shopper Loyalty Through a Subscription Service

In this case study, students combine data-based insights with strategic considerations to make fundamental business decisions at the German grocery retail chain Real. In response to dwindling numbers of customers and reduced revenues, Real developed the RealPro customer benefits program to achieve a quick turnaround. For a fixed annual fee, RealPro members receive substantial and permanent discounts of 20% on nonpromoted items from a broad range of food categories. Students employ data analytics methods to extract insights from the provided data set, which contains point-of-sale information from the actual market test of RealPro. Based on these insights, decisions concerning the rollout and design of the RealPro program must be made. We provide data analysis solutions in both Excel and R to analyze 75 thousand customer transactions. In the case extension, students can apply the difference-in-differences method and two covariate balancing algorithms for in-depth statistical analyses. For this purpose, we provide an additional unbalanced data set with 83 thousand transactions, on which the students can test and analyze propensity score matching and entropy balancing models.

Demand Estimation Using Managerial Responses to Automated Price Recommendations

We provide a new framework to identify demand elasticities in markets where managers rely on algorithmic recommendations for price setting and apply it to a data set containing bookings for a sample of midsized hotels in Europe. Using nonbinding algorithmic price recommendations and observed delay in price adjustments by decision makers, we demonstrate that a control-function approach, combined with state-of-the-art model-selection techniques, can be used to isolate exogenous price variation and identify demand elasticities across hotel room types and over time. We confirm these elasticity estimates with a difference-in-differences approach that leverages the same delays in price adjustments by decision makers. However, the difference-in-differences estimates are more noisy and only yield consistent estimates if data are pooled across hotels. We then apply our control-function approach to two classic questions in the dynamic pricing literature: the evolution of price elasticity of demand over and the effects of a transitory price change on future demand due to the presence of strategic buyers. Finally, we discuss how our empirical framework can be applied directly to other decision-making situations in which recommendation systems are used. This paper was accepted by Omar Besbes, revenue management and market analytics.

Accounting Restatements and Bank Liquidity Creation

Banks play a central role in creating liquidity for the economy by financing illiquid assets with liquid liabilities. This paper examines the effect of accounting restatements on bank liquidity creation. Using a difference-in-differences research design, I show that restatements trigger a significant reduction in liquidity creation. This effect derives mainly from banks shifting away from illiquid assets and toward liquid assets. Further analysis reveals that restatements affect liquidity creation through supervisory enforcement actions and unravelling of risk exposures accumulated in the misreporting period. Government deposit insurance blunts the effect of an information asymmetry channel.

The Effect of Concealed-Carry and Handgun Restrictions on Gun-Related Deaths: Evidence from the Sullivan Act of 1911

The 1911 NY State Sullivan Act (SA) outlawed carrying concealable firearms without a licence, established strict licencing rules, and regulated the sale and possession of handguns. We analyse the effects of the SA using historical data on mortality rates, pistol permits, and citations for illegal carrying. Our analysis of pistol permits and citations reveal clear initial effects of the SA on gun-related behaviours. Using synthetic control and difference-in-differences methodologies, our main analyses show no effects on overall homicide rates, evidence of a reduction in overall suicide rates, and strong evidence of a large and sustained decrease in gun-related suicide rates.

Tax-Induced Inequalities in the Sharing Economy

The growth of sharing economy marketplaces like Airbnb has generated discussions on their socioeconomic impact and lack of regulation. As a result, most major cities in the United States have started to collect an “occupancy tax” for Airbnb bookings. In this study, we investigate the heterogeneous treatment effects of the occupancy tax policy on Airbnb listings, using a combination of a generalized causal forest methodology and a difference-in-differences framework. While we find that the introduction of the tax significantly reduces both listing revenues and sales, more importantly, these effects are disproportionately more pronounced for residential hosts with single shared-space (nontarget) listings versus commercial hosts with multiple properties or entire-space (target) listings. We further show that this unintended consequence is caused by customers’ discriminatory tax aversion against nontarget listings. We then leverage these empirical results by prescribing how hosts should optimally set prices in response to the occupancy tax and identify the discriminatory tax rates that would equalize the tax’s effect across nontarget and target listings. This paper was accepted by Victor Martínez-de-Albéniz, operations management.

The winner-loser satisfaction gap in the absence of a clear outcome

In this manuscript, we examine the impact of voting for the winning candidate on satisfaction with democracy. While extensive evidence exists documenting this relationship, it is almost entirely correlational in nature. We take advantage of survey timing during the 2000 post-election period in the U.S. when the vast majority of respondents were uncertain about who would win the presidency. Employing 2000–2002 panel data and using a difference-in-differences model, we are able to establish a relationship between electoral outcome and satisfaction with democracy that appears only for respondents interviewed once the outcome became official. We find an increase in satisfaction among winners and a parallel decrease among losers from 2000 to 2002. Importantly, our design allows us to go further than most studies to make causal claims.

Uneven regulatory playing field and bank transparency abroad

Motivated by international business research on institutional arbitrage and headquarters–subsidiary relationships, we examine the effect of regulatory distance on multinational banks’ (MNBs) reporting transparency abroad. Using an international sample of foreign subsidiary banks in 46 host countries from 47 home countries, we find that bank transparency declines when the home countries have tighter activity restrictions than the host countries. We bolster the causal inference using difference-in-differences designs that take advantage of banking reforms and cross-border bank acquisitions. We also find that the result is more pronounced when parent banks have lower capital ratios or when host countries have weaker supervisory power, suggesting that parent banks use opaque reporting to conceal risk-taking abroad. Further analysis finds that less transparent subsidiaries are more likely to fail during financial crises. Overall, our findings suggest that regulatory distance creates negative externalities for bank transparency and stability abroad.

Can competition improve hospital quality of care? A difference-in-differences approach to evaluate the effect of increasing quality transparency on hospital quality

Public reporting on the quality of care is intended to guide patients to the provider with the highest quality and to stimulate a fair competition on quality. We apply a difference-in-differences design to test whether hospital quality has improved more in markets that are more competitive after the first public release of performance data in Germany in 2008. Panel data from 947 hospitals from 2006 to 2010 are used. Due to the high complexity of the treatment of stroke patients, we approximate general hospital quality by the 30-day risk-adjusted mortality rate for stroke treatment. Market structure is measured (comparatively) by the Herfindahl–Hirschman index (HHI) and by the number of hospitals in the relevant market. Predicted market shares based on exogenous variables only are used to compute the HHI to allow a causal interpretation of the reform effect. A homogenous positive effect of competition on quality of care is found. This effect is mainly driven by the response of non-profit hospitals that have a narrow range of services and private for-profit hospitals with a medium range of services. The results highlight the relevance of outcome transparency to enhance hospital quality competition.