Seminar in Economics | with Stephan Seiler
Welcome to this Higher Seminar in Economics organized by the Department of Economics, SSE. The seminar speaker is Stephan Seiler, Imperial College London who will present his paper on "Demand Estimation with Text and Image Data"
Abstract
We propose a demand estimation method that allows researchers to estimate substitution patterns from unstructured image and text data. We first employ a series of machine learning models to measure product similarity from products' images and textual descriptions. We then estimate a nested logit model with product-pair specific nesting parameters that depend on the image and text similarities between products. Our framework does not require collecting product attributes for each category and can capture product similarity along dimensions that are hard to account for with observed attributes. We apply our method to a dataset describing the behavior of Amazon shoppers across several categories and show that incorporating texts and images in demand estimation helps us recover a flexible cross-price elasticity matrix.
More about the Speaker
The seminar takes place at Stockholm School of Economics, Sveavägen 65, room A750.
Please contact kathrine.abelson@hhs.se if you have any questions.