Essays in Behavioral Industrial Organization and Natural Resource Economics

Essays in Behavioral Industrial Organization and Natural Resource Economics
Author: Kiriti Kanjilal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2018
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation analyzes firms' side problems in economics using an industrial organization approach to provide analysis and policy tools.

Essays in Industrial Organization and Behavioral Economics

Essays in Industrial Organization and Behavioral Economics
Author: Ting-Hao Jordan Ou
Publisher:
Total Pages: 58
Release: 2017
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation is comprised of two essays at the intersection of Empirical Industrial Organization and Behavioral Economics. They explore how business decisions are more richly explained with additions in psychological insights commonly found among consumers. These behavioral biases can affect a firm's decision to participate and their supply in the market, ultimately impacting market competition, supply thickness, and equilibrium. In Chapter 1, I explore how retailers make entry and exit decisions in the context of an online marketplace. Using a rich panel of internal data from eBay on dedicated sellers, I analyze a feature of the platform requiring sellers to select among monthly contracts that differ in the listing fee schedules. I further exploit a regime change that introduced a monthly allowance of free listings of inventory, altering all contracts from a two-part tariff to a three-part tariff design. This design change was effective in attracting new users and sellers to the platform, encouraging experienced users to become high-volume sellers, and increasing total inventory listed in the marketplace. This is despite little changes in average costs of selling. I demonstrate that standard entry and exit models cannot explain this increase in supply and competition. Instead, I propose loss aversion as an additional factor impacting participation. Chapter 2 investigates how high-volume, experienced retailers value their products and make supply decisions. Using similar data from eBay and exploiting the same contract feature and policy change, I analyze both the sellers' contract choice decisions and the timing of product listings. By estimating a dynamic model of plan choice and listing decisions, I find that sellers have a limited learning period and hold biased beliefs on the option values of their products. Furthermore, they respond heterogeneously to dynamic incentives and future listing costs, leading to an uneven supply of products on the platform. Using the model estimates, I show that debiasing sellers would increase seller surplus by 6\% but decrease platform listing revenue by 26%. However, since many platforms generate the majority of revenue from percentage fees on the listings' values, they may prefer to pursue policies that increase total listings. By targeting specific sellers, such policies can increase aggregate listings on the platform by up to 4.8% at a loss of 5.5% in listing revenue.

Essays in Behavioral Industrial Organization, Corruption, and Marketing

Essays in Behavioral Industrial Organization, Corruption, and Marketing
Author: Dominique Olié Lauga
Publisher:
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN:

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(Cont.) In this case, a firm that conducts market research will always innovate on the attribute it discovers that consumers prefer, and expend more on R & D than a rival that has not conducted market research. With horizontal preferences, distinct segments exist-each cares about innovation on only one attribute-and firms are a priori uncertain how many consumers are in each segment. In this case, a firm that conducts market research may follow a 'niche' strategy and innovate to serve the smaller segment to avoid intense price competition for the larger segment. Consequently, a firm that conducts market research may invest less in R & D and earn lower profits post-launch than a rival that has forgone such research.

Handbook of Behavioral Industrial Organization

Handbook of Behavioral Industrial Organization
Author: Victor J. Tremblay
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2018
Genre: Economics
ISBN: 178471898X

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The Handbook of Behavioral Industrial Organization integrates behavioral economics into industrial organization. Chapters cover concepts such as relative thinking, salience, shrouded attributes, cognitive dissonance, motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, overconfidence, status quo bias, social cooperation and identity. Additional chapters consider industry issues, such as sports and gambling industries, neuroeconomic studies of brands and advertising, and behavioral antitrust law. The Handbook features a wide array of methods (literature surveys, experimental and econometric research, and theoretical modelling), facilitating accessibility to a wide audience.