| Meat demand studies focusing on U.S. consumers have, with few exceptions, been conducted using aggregate data. These data are aggregated across products, time, and consumers. This has been largely due to a lack of micro-level purchase or consumption data. Such analyses have provided much useful information about how consumer demand for meat from certain species has evolved over time. However, with each level of aggregation, valuable information about the within-species relationships of meat products and consumer behavior are potentially obscured. Some initial efforts at estimating meat demand for disaggregated meat products have indeed shown that both price elasticity and substitutability vary within species.; In recent years, micro-level demand analysis, in general, has become increasingly popular as access to micro-level data and computing power has increased. Still, there are only a few demand studies conducted at the micro level that allow prices to vary and calculate price elasticities. There are no studies to do so in the context of U.S. meat demand.; This study contributes to the meat demand literature by presenting, specifying, and estimating a demand system for 12 specific meat products based on the purchase behavior of a sample of U.S. households between the years of 1992 and 2000. The Almost Ideal (AI) Demand System was used in estimation. As a method of addressing the unobserved prices that are present in all micro-level purchase (or consumption) data sets, the Expectation Maximization (EM) Algorithm was used to solve the AI system of 12 share equations.; The EM algorithm provides a computationally efficient estimator of such a system. This novel use of the EM approach offers an alternative to researchers wishing to estimate large demand systems with unobserved or missing data. The results obtained indicate there is heterogeneity across consumers, in regard to meat demand. Number of persons in the household and age of head of household each impact meat demand. Furthermore, there are significant cross-product price impacts within species of meat. Such results would not be obtainable from traditional aggregate demand studies. Elasticities at the micro level are similar to those at the aggregate level, with few exceptions. |
