Wednesday, April 1, 2026 12:30 - 14:00

This event is both online and in person.

SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH

Online participants are welcome:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_macroiep) to receive event updates and a link to the seminar online.

About this event

In spatial choices such as commuting, migration, or firm-to-firm trade, agents face a large set of options but typically choose only from a small subset of alternatives. Partial consideration makes it difficult to infer how agents value option attributes. For example, observed choices may reflect both preferences over distance and how distance affects whether an option is considered. Our main result establishes that, in a broad class of general equilibrium spatial models, this distinction is welfare-neutral in the limit as the number of options grows. That is, models that differ in their mix of consideration and preferences, but rationalize the same choice patterns, have the same welfare implications. The expected size of the consideration set governs the convergence rate, and simulations show that the welfare gap between a model that accounts for partial consideration and a naive full-consideration benchmark is small once agents consider as few as 5?10 alternatives. We illustrate our results with an application to workplace choices of garment workers in urban Bangladesh, where we directly measure consideration sets and calibrate the relative contributions of consideration and preferences to commuting flows.

Participants are expected to adhere to the CEP Events Code of Conduct.

Directions

This event will take place in SAL 1.04, 1st Floor Conference Room, Sir Arthur Lewis Building, LSE, 32 Lincoln's Inn Fields, London WC2A 3PH.

Online participants are welcome:
Please sign up to our mailinglist (seminar_macroiep) to receive event updates and a link to the seminar online.

The building is labelled SAL on the LSE campus map. You can also find us on Google Maps. For further information, go to contact us.

Trade and Urban Seminars are part of the CEP's Trade programme and Urban programme.