National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan
Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo, Japan
National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan
抄録
This article proposes a Bayesian estimation of demand functions under block-rate pricing by focusing on increasing block-rate pricing. This is the first study that explicitly considers the separability condition which has been ignored in previous literature. Under this pricing structure, the price changes when consumption exceeds a certain threshold and the consumer faces a utility maximization problem subject to a piecewise-linear budget constraint. Solving this maximization problem leads to a statistical model in which model parameters are strongly restricted by the separability condition. In this article, by taking a hierarchical Bayesian approach, we implement a Markov chain Monte Carlo simulation to properly estimate the demand function. We find, however, that the convergence of the distribution of simulated samples to the posterior distribution is slow, requiring an additional scale transformation step for parameters to the Gibbs sampler. These proposed methods are then applied to estimate the Japanese residential water demand function.
内容記述
本文フィルはリンク先を参照のこと
雑誌名
Discussion paper series. CIRJE-F
巻
CIRJE-F-712
発行年
2010-01
書誌レコードID
AA11450569
フォーマット
application/pdf
日本十進分類法
335
出版者
日本経済国際共同センター
出版者別名
Center for International Research on the Japanese Economy
Bayesian Estimation of Demand Functions under Block-Rate Pricing
