Trade allowances are upfront payments from manufacturers to retailer before their products are placed on the shelf. Though trade allowances motivate stores to offer more products through cost sharing with manufacturers (“expansion effect”), which benefit consumers; they also lead stores to exclude some high-quality, low-cost products that pay low trade allowances (“distortion effect”), which harms consumers. To quantify this trade-off, I construct a model of demand and supply, in which stores decide on both assortments and prices based on offers from manufacturers. I use stores’ revealed preferences to construct moment inequalities and quantify the magnitude of trade allowances. My estimates imply that in the U.S. yogurt market, trade allowances account for 14.8% of an average store’s wholesale payments. Counterfactual analysis shows that trade allowances increase the number of products offered by 2.4% but reduce consumer surplus by 1.0%. This finding suggests that the costs of distortion outweigh the benefits of assortment expansion.

We examine how the shift of streaming platforms to an advertiser-supported revenue model affects their content offerings and consumers. This shift forces platforms to adjust their content strategies, though the direction is unclear. Platforms may aim to increase ad impressions by offering content that appeals to a broad audience, thereby driving up viewership. Alternatively, they may seek to increase the value of impressions by targeting niche audiences, who are typically more valuable to advertisers. These changes also impact consumers: while they generally dislike ads, consumers might benefit from adjusted content offerings if aligning with their preferences. We plan to answer this question using data on content offerings of platforms and consumer viewership.

In the United States, retail pharmacies procure generic drugs through auctions before selling them to consumers. Over the past decade, the pharmacy sector has consolidated into four major buying alliances, significantly lowering procurement costs. manufacturers’ aversion to market exclusion and economies of scale in production. We will develop and estimate an auction model incorporating these forces and leverage variation in the number of bidders to separately identify their effects. We have collected data on alliance formation, and drug applications, and auction winners and winning prices to estimate this model.