Congratulations to Afonso Rodrigues, who has been awarded the prize for his job market paper, “Consumer Choice over Shopping Baskets: a Linear Demand Approach”, at the 2025 Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications.
The paper challenges conventional approaches to the estimation of demand, demonstrating that standard measures of price elasticity can be systematically biased when consumers’ cross-category, multi-product purchasing decisions are overlooked. Rather than treating goods in isolation, Afonso shows the importance of analysing entire baskets of products, thereby capturing more faithfully the way households organise their expenditure.
By developing a linear demand framework designed to address shortcomings in existing methods, and applying it to Portuguese supermarket transactions during the COVID years, his structural analysis offers new insights into consumer behaviour. Most notably, he provides the first evidence of an economy-wide reduction and convergence in retail mark-ups across the full range of goods.
Afonso Rodrigues will be entering the academic job market this year. The Department is delighted to recognise this distinction and warmly congratulates him on his outstanding research achievements, wishing him every success in the next stage of his career.
Find out more and access his paper here: Afonso Rodrigues - Research
