Alan Sorensen
Professor of Economics
I am the John and Tashia Morgridge Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research focuses on industrial organization, with particular interests in consumer search and learning, information economics, and the economics of media and entertainment markets.
My work examines how information affects market outcomes, including studies on bestseller lists, product variety, price dispersion, and consumer decision-making in various industries including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, music, and hospitality.
Published papers
- "Equilibrium Price Dispersion in Retail Markets for Prescription Drugs," Journal of Political Economy, v. 108 n. 4 (August 2000). [PDF]
- "Insurer-Hospital Bargaining: Negotiated Discounts in Post-deregulation Connecticut," Journal of Industrial Economics, v. 51 n. 4 (December 2003). [PDF]
- "Information and Consumer Choice: The Value of Publicized Health Plan Ratings" (with Ginger Jin), Journal of Health Economics, v. 26 n. 2 (March 2006). [PDF]
- "Social Learning and Health Plan Choice," RAND Journal of Economics, v. 37 n. 4 (Winter 2006). [PDF]
- "Bestseller Lists and Product Variety," Journal of Industrial Economics, v. 55 n. 4 (December 2007). [PDF]
- "Information and the Skewness of Music Sales" (with Ken Hendricks), Journal of Political Economy, v. 117 n. 2 (April 2009). [PDF]
- "Positive Effects of Negative Publicity: When Negative Reviews Increase Sales" (with Jonah Berger and Scott Rasmussen), Marketing Science, v. 29 n. 5 (September-October 2010). [PDF]
- "Bundle-size Pricing as an Approximation to Mixed Bundling" (with Sean Chu and Phillip Leslie), American Economic Review, v. 101 n. 1 (February 2011). [PDF]
- "Calorie Posting in Chain Restaurants" (with Bryan Bollinger and Phillip Leslie), American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, v. 3 n. 1 (February 2011). [PDF]
- "Observational Learning and Demand for Search Goods" (with Ken Hendricks and Tom Wiseman), American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, v. 4 n. 1 (February 2012). [PDF]
- "Supply Responses to Digital Distribution: Recorded Music and Live Performances" (with Julie Holland Mortimer and Chris Nosko), Information Economics and Policy, v. 24 n. 1 (March 2012). [PDF]
- "Resale and Rent-Seeking: An Application to Ticket Markets" (with Phillip Leslie), Review of Economic Studies, v. 81 (2014). [PDF]
- "Bestseller Lists and the Economics of Product Discovery," Annual Review of Economics, 2017. [PDF]
- "The Impact of Information Technology on the Diffusion of New Pharmaceuticals" (with Kenneth Arrow and Kamran Bilir), American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2020. [PDF]
- "Students' Heterogeneous Preferences and the Uneven Spatial Distribution of Colleges" (with Chao Fu, Junjie Guo, and Adam Smith), Journal of Monetary Economics, 2022. [PDF]
- "Product Repositioning by Merging Firms" (with Enghin Atalay, Chris Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu), Journal of Industrial Economics, 2024. [PDF]
- "Triplet Embeddings for Demand Estimation" (with Lorenzo Magnolfi and Jonathon McClure), American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2025. [PDF]
- "Scalable Demand and Markups" (with Enghin Atalay, Erika Frost, Chris Sullivan, and Wanjia Zhu), forthcoming, Journal of Political Economy. [PDF]
Unpublished working papers
- "Price Dispersion and Heterogeneous Consumer Search for Retail Prescription Drugs," NBER Working Paper 8548, October 2001. [PDF]
- "For-Profit Entry and Market Expansion in the Hospice Industry" (with Andrea P. Chung). [PDF]
- "Does Hospice Reduce Costs at the End of Life? Estimates from a Dynamic Model of Hospice Choice" (with Toby Campbell, Andrea Chung, and Dennis McWeeny). [PDF]
- "Measuring the Value of Targeted Television Advertising" (with Lu Liao and Andrey Zubanov). [PDF]
- "Dynamics and Efficiency in Decentralized Online Auction Markets" (with Ken Hendricks and Tom Wiseman). [PDF]
I have taught undergraduate, MBA, and PhD-level courses in Industrial Organization, Microeconomics, Data Analysis, and Econometrics.
I've also taught executive trainings in data analytics and econometrics for eBay and Amazon.
The courses I mainly teach at UW-Madison:
- Principles of Microeconomics (Econ 101) -- This is an introductory course covering fundamental concepts like opportunity cost, supply and demand, externalities, etc. [Sample syllabus]
- Industrial Organization (Econ 762) -- This is a course for PhD students specializing in Industrial Organization, mostly focused on empirical research, covering topics including nonlinear pricing, consumer search, advertising, innovation, and dynamic games. to [Sample syllabus]