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 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.

New Perspectives on Industrial Organization

New Perspectives on Industrial Organization
Author: Victor J. Tremblay
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 820
Release: 2012-07-20
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1461432413

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This book covers the main topics that students need to learn in a course on Industrial Organization. It reviews the classic models and important empirical evidence related to the field. However, it will differ from prior textbooks in two ways. First, this book incorporates contributions from behavioral economics and neuroeconomics, providing the reader with a richer understanding of consumer preferences and the motivation for many of the business practices we see today. The book discusses how firms exploit consumers who are prone to making mistakes and who suffer from cognitive dissonance, attention lapses, and bounded rationality, for example and will help explain why firms invest in persuasive advertising, offer 30-day free trials, offer money-back guarantees, and engage in other observed phenomena that cannot be explained by the traditional approaches to industrial organization. A second difference is that this book achieves a balance between textbooks that emphasize formal modeling and those that emphasize the history of the field, empirical evidence, case studies, and policy analysis. This text puts more emphasis on the micro-foundations (i.e., consumer and producer theory), classic game theoretic models, and recent contributions from behavioral economics that are pertinent to industrial organization. Each topic will begin with a discussion of relevant theory and models and will also include a discussion of concrete examples, empirical evidence, and evidence from case studies. This will provide students with a deeper understanding of firm and consumer behavior, of the factors that influence market structure and economic performance, and of policy issues involving imperfectly competitive markets. The book is intended to be a textbook for graduate students, MBAs and upper-level undergraduates and will use examples, graphical analysis, algebra, and simple calculus to explain important ideas and theories in industrial organization.

Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization

Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization
Author: David B. Audretsch
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9401127956

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Empirical Studies in Industrial Organization brings together leading scholars who present state-of-the-art research in the spirit of the structure-conduct-performance paradigm embodied in the work of Leonard W. Weiss. The individual chapters are generally empirically or public policy oriented. A number of them introduce new sources of data that, combined with the application of appropriate econometric techniques, enable new breakthroughs and insights on issues hotly debated in the industrial organization literature. For example, five of the chapters are devoted towards uncovering the link between market concentration and pricing behavior. While theoretical models have produced ambiguous predictions concerning the relationship between concentration and price these chapters, which span a number of different markets and situations, provide unequivocal evidence that a high level of market concentration tends to result in a higher level of prices. Three of the chapters explore the impact of market structure on production efficiency, and three other chapters focus on the role of industrial organization on public policy. Contributors include David B. Audretsch, Richard E. Caves, Mark J. Roberts, F.M. Scherer, John J. Siegfried and Hideki Yamawaki.

Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization

Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization
Author: Ran Spiegler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2011-02-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0199813426

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Conventional economic theory assumes that consumers are fully rational, that they have well-defined preferences and easily understand the market environment. Yet, in fact, consumers may have inconsistent, context-dependent preferences or simply not enough brain-power to evaluate and compare complicated products. Thus the standard model of consumer behavior-which depends on an ideal market in which consumers are boundlessly rational-is called into question. While behavioral economists have for some time confirmed and characterized these inconsistencies, the logical next step is to examine the implications they have in markets. Grounded in key observations in consumer psychology, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization develops non-standard models of "boundedly rational" consumer behavior and embeds them into familiar models of markets. It then rigorously analyses each model in the tradition of microeconomic theory, leading to a richer, more realistic picture of consumer behavior. Ran Spiegler analyses phenomena such as exploitative price plans in the credit market, complexity of financial products and other obfuscation practices, consumer antagonism to unexpected price increases, and the role of default options in consumer decision making. Spiegler unifies the relevant literature into three main strands: limited ability to anticipate and control future choices, limited ability to understand complex market environments, and sensitivity to reference points. Although the challenge of enriching the psychology of decision makers in economic models has been at the frontier of theoretical research in the last decade, there has been no graduate-level, theory-oriented textbook to cover developments in the last 10-15 years. Thus, Bounded Rationality and Industrial Organization offers a welcome and crucial new understanding of market behavior-it challenges conventional wisdom in ways that are interesting and economically significant, and which in the end effect the well-being of all market participants.

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.

Industrial Organization

Industrial Organization
Author: Li Way Lee
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2019-09-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 3030262375

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This book takes the reader on a new tour of the world of firms. We start with a visit to the inside of a firm. We meet the owner and the manager. We look deeply into their mindsets. Then we move outside the firm, to observe the firm's outer features. We pay particular attention to its size, its complexity, its fragility, and its similarity to other firms. In the second half of the tour, we visit communities of firms. We watch waves of mergers, chaos, and bubbles. Before returning, we witness battles between firms and creatures that act like antibodies in our blood: corporate raiders, antitrust agencies, and creative destructors. Throughout the tour, we ask how the things we see are linked. This book encourages the reader to see them as feedback loops. The book’s overarching argument is the importance of the separation of ownership and control and how society must pay more attention to the concept..