Pre-Training Estimators for Structural Models: Application to Consumer Search
结构模型的预训练估计器:消费者搜寻应用
We develop pre-trained estimators for structural econometric models. The estimator uses a neural net to recognize the structural model's parameter from data patterns. Once trained, the estimator can be shared and applied to different datasets at negligible cost and effort. Under sufficient training, the estimator converges to the Bayesian posterior given the data patterns. As an illustration, we construct a pretrained estimator for a sequential search model (available at…