Benjamin Norton

Benjamin Norton, Ph.D., is an economist with experience in economic consulting, empirical economic analysis, and field research. He provides economic consulting services involving relevant market definition, market structure and competitive effects, antitrust liability and impact, economic damages, econometric and regression analyses, analysis of large transactional databases, and economic impact analysis. He also has extensive experience designing and implementing surveys, randomized experiments, and other methods for collecting and analyzing novel economic data. His experience spans a range of industries, including agriculture, food processing, food retail, healthcare and insurance, and pharmaceuticals.

At Stout, Benjamin advises publicly traded and privately held companies in complex commercial litigation involving antitrust and breach-of-contract disputes. Working with trial attorneys and expert economists, he conducts economic research and empirical analyses supporting expert testimony in state and federal courts. His work includes analysis of relevant markets, market structure, pricing and competitive effects, antitrust liability and damages, and large-scale transactional data. He applies econometric and statistical methods to develop and evaluate empirical damages models and other economic analyses.

Prior to joining Stout, Benjamin conducted applied economic research on pricing, competition, consumer demand, and firm behavior. His doctoral research combined city-wide retail censuses, large-scale firm surveys, randomized field experiments, and econometric analysis to study competition and pricing in retail markets. In Tanzania, he collected pricing and market-structure data from more than 2,000 retailers and designed and implemented a field experiment involving more than 500 firms to measure willingness to compete on price, responses to below-market pricing, and learning about consumer demand. His research also examined nonlinear pricing, input-cost pass-through, price discrimination, price dispersion, consumer beliefs about product quality, technology adoption, and the targeting of humanitarian assistance.

Benjamin’s research has been published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, and he has presented his work at academic conferences and seminars in the United States and internationally. His M.S. thesis at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign received the Outstanding M.S. Thesis Award from both the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics and the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association. At Cornell, he was also recognized by the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management for outstanding service as a graduate teaching assistant.