May 2014

IZA DP No. 8178: Entropy Methods for Identifying Hedonic Models

published in: Mathematics and Financial Economics, 2014, 8 (4), 405-416, (special issue in celebration of Ivar Ekeland's 70th birthday.)

This paper contributes to the literature on hedonic models in two ways. First, it makes use of Queyranne's reformulation of a hedonic model in the discrete case as a network flow problem in order to provide a proof of existence and integrality of a hedonic equilibrium and efficient computational techniques of hedonic prices. Second, elaborating on entropic methods developed in Galichon and Salanié (2014), this paper proposes a new identification strategy for hedonic models in a single market. This methodology allows one to introduce heterogeneities in both consumers' and producers' attributes and to recover producers' profits and consumers' utilities based on the observation of production and consumption patterns and the set of hedonic prices.