Demand for carbonated soft drinks: implications for obesity policy

This article examines consumer choices of Carbonated Soft Drinks (CSDs) and their implications for obesity policy. Demand in relation to product and consumer heterogeneity is estimated via a random coefficients logit model (Berry et al., 1995) applied to quarterly scanner data for 26 brands in 20 US cities, involving 40 000 consumers. Counterfactual experiments show that caloric taxes could be effective in decreasing caloric CSD consumption though having little impact on obesity incidence.