Essays on consumer behavior and demand analysis: Food quality, non-market goods, and habit persistence

This dissertation consists of three essays on consumer behavior and demand analysis. The three essays incorporate quality variation, non-market goods and habit-persistence, respectively, into the framework of traditional consumer behavior analysis from a theoretical perspective. The essays also use data from China to empirically analyze the demand for food quality, environmental quality, and alcohol and cigarettes in China.;Essay 1 develops a theoretical framework to calculate the biases in income and price elasticities when unit values are used as prices in demand analysis, because unit values reflect not only prices but also information about product quality. The theory is applied in order to calculate corrected income and price elasticities for the demand for food in rural China, starting with elasticity estimates from the current literature.;Essay 2 develops a four-hurdle model, which is a limited information econometric model, to deal with zero bids and missing responses in open-ended bidding for contingent valuation methods of non-market goods. The model is used to analyze the willingness to pay for blue skies in Beijing through the government's Duststorm Sources Control Project.;Essay 3 constructs a habit-persistence model and uses a panel dataset to apply the model to the study addictive behavior, in particular, the interactions between alcohol and cigarette consumption in rural China.