Nontransactional data in managerial economics and marketing

Most business decisions must be made on the basis of nontransactional data - data collected in advance of market transactions and perhaps never to be revealed in a transaction. These are data regarding items such as consumer knowledge, information processing, and attitudes. Modern economics' refusal to use nontransactional data has fostered the creation of entire disciplines outside of economics such as market research and consumer research. Vertical marketing arrangements typically involve difficult problems in monitoring, which is required to prevent parties from engaging in opportunistic behavior. One solution is to bring nontransactional data to bear on the problems of monitoring. Nontransactional data can be used to reduce adverse-selection problems. The use of nontransactional data, based on such things as consumer surveys, can interact with transactional reasoning in several ways. In particular, such data can be very useful in monitoring performance. The economics profession can benefit itself and also provide social benefits if it expands the areas of application into direct uses of economics for business.