Entropy Methods for Identifying Hedonic Models

Arnaud Dupuy , Alfred Galichon (1) , Marc Henry (2, 3)

1 ECON - Département d'économie (Sciences Po)
2 CIRANO - Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en analyse des organisations
3 CIREQ - Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en économie quantitative

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 computation of hedonic prices. Second, elaborating on entropic methods developed in Galichon and Salanié (Cupid’s invisible hand: social surplus and identification in matching models. Working Paper, 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.

Mots clés: Hedonic Equilibrium; Generalized Entropy; Single Market Identification

Domaines: Economies et finances

Arnaud Dupuy, Alfred Galichon, Marc Henry. Entropy Methods for Identifying Hedonic Models. Mathematics and Financial Economics, 2014, 8 (4), pp.405 - 516. ⟨10.1007/s11579-014-0125-1⟩. ⟨hal-03393019⟩