Author: Jessica Calfee Stahl
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170
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Abstract: While mergers are highly visible and changes in market structure can have large effects on social welfare, very little empirical work has studied the determinants of merger activity. My dissertation analyzes merger decisions made by firms so as to understand incentives to merge. Chapter 1 uses patent citation data to determine whether firms are more or less actively engaged in sequential innovation after they merge. The ability to capture information spillovers may enhance merged firms' incentives to build upon one another's innovations; yet merging may reduce the firms' incentives to leap-frog one another. Looking at mergers between public companies from 1980 to 2003, I find that in nearly all industries, cross-citations between two firms increase before they merge and then fall after they merge. This suggests that the firms were engaged in an innovation race that was slowed by the merger. Firms may seek out these mergers partly to reduce innovation competition. Chapter 2 exploits an exogenous change in regulation that led to significant consolidation in the broadcast television industry. The vast majority of consolidation was across local markets, so it is not clear what drove consolidation. This chapter uses a panel dataset on ownership and revenue of broadcast stations in order to estimate the revenue advantages of consolidation. I find that revenue advantages come through access to a wider audience, most likely because a firm can offer advertisers more viewers per contract. Chapter 3 uses results from the second chapter, and estimates a dynamic oligopoly model in order to identify the cost advantages of consolidation in the television industry. I infer costs from patterns in ownership changes that are unexplained by revenue estimation. I model firms' decisions as a dynamic game, and estimate the game using a two-step method recently developed by Bajari, Benkard and Levin (2007). This is the first paper to estimate a model of merger activity in a dynamic, strategic framework. I find that owning more stations enables firms to reduce per-station operating costs. A firm's ability to do this is affected by its stations' network affiliations, the location of its stations and the demographic heterogeneity of its viewers.
Author: Eric Jahn
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 133
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Author: Brady Thomas Vaughan
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Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 113
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In the first chapter of my dissertation, Aleksandr Yankelevich and I examine the effects of price matching guarantees on duopoly markets. We find that a commitment to price-match raises prices by altering consumer search behavior in three ways. First, price-matching diminishes firms' incentives to lower prices to attract consumers who have no search costs. Second, for consumers with positive search costs, price-matching lowers the marginal benefit of search, inducing them to accept higher prices. Finally, price-matching can lead to asymmetric equilibria where one firm runs fewer sales and both firms tend to offer smaller discounts than in a symmetric equilibrium. These price increases grow with the proportion of consumers who invoke price-matching guarantees and also in the level of equilibrium asymmetry. The second chapter studies the effect of the complexity of consumers' preferences over a product on that product's market structure. I relate complexity of preferences to the number of dimensions of a Lancasterian characteristic space. Using a novel higher dimensional Hotelling model, I find that a fixed number of firms are likely to be better off competing over products with more complex preferences. Although firms face more intense competition in higher dimensional markets, the greater product differentiation afforded to them allows them to charge higher prices and earn higher profits. This result provides a clear theoretical foundation for the observation that goods associated with more complex preferences typically display a greater variety of products sold. Additionally, I show that the behavior of more than two firms competing in more than one dimension differs wildly from that of firms typically studied in models of spatial competition. The final chapter will examine firms' motives for implementing grandfather clauses that allow certain consumers to continue to access a service at a favorable, but no longer available price. Grandfather clauses permit firms to price discriminate between early adopters and new consumers in exchange for forfeiting the right to optimally set prices for early adopters. They may be used to thwart competition following a structural change, to respond to cost shocks, or to retain customers who consume another good from a multiproduct firm. We analyze under what conditions firms might choose to offer grandfather clauses and what effects they have on welfare.
Author: Yun Mi Nam
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 202
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Abstract: Competing firms strategically interact when they make decisions about entry/exit, a product type, or technology adoption. This dissertation explores the determinants of firms' strategies and the effect on the resulting market structure. The first chapter analyzes product differentiation and market structure in the Texas lodging industry. I model the lodging properties' entry, exit and quality decisions as a dynamic oligopoly game and apply the estimation strategy similar to the Nested Pseudo Likelihood (NPL) Algorithm. Using annual data for hotels and motels in Texas in the 1990's, I find that there is a strong incentive for the lodging properties to differentiate themselves by choosing different quality-levels from competitors. Also, I show that high transition costs relative to the exit value deter low quality-level properties from changing their quality-level and induce more to exit. The second chapter investigates the relationship between risk and vertical integration. I modify an ordered Probit model to examine how economic factors, particularly risks, affect the choice of organizational form. I estimate the model using cross-sectional data on the company-owned, franchised and independent properties in the Texas lodging industry. The estimation result shows that overall market risk strengthens the independent properties and weakens the other two forms (franchised and company-owned properties). It also indicates that the form-specific risk is significantly associated with the choice of the organizational form. The third chapter estimates the size of hospital markets, which plays a key role in the antitrust enforcement of hospital mergers. I determine the relevant market size by finding the distance between hospitals at which the choices of technology adoption do not interact, using data on the adoption of SPECT diagnostic imaging technologies. I show that the Elzinga/Hogarty approach taken in the antitrust cases overestimates the relevant market size of hospitals.
Author: Johannes Konstantin Schmalz
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Almarin Phillips
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Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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No detailed description available for "Market Structure, Organization, and Performance".
Author: Andy Wei-Rong Chen
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 65
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The two essays explore two topics in marketing - consumer purchase behavior and competitive firm strategies. The first essay examines consumer stockpiling behavior in the retail gasoline market and aims to shed light on what factors affect consumer stockpiling. Past research on consumer stockpiling behavior such as Hendel and Nevo (2006) finds evidence of inter-temporal substitution by consumers that implies stockpiling behavior. However, they do not observe actual inventory or consumption and have to rely on simplifying assumptions about these quantities. I collect a novel data set of gasoline purchase history of consumers with actual inventory and consumption to test several hypotheses that relate consumer stockpiling to price, duration between purchases, and consumption. First, I find that consumers holding more inventory are more price sensitive. Higher inventory increases the impact of price on purchase decisions and those with higher inventory can afford to do more price search before making a purchase. I also find that all else equal, consumers will reduce consumption following a purchase made during high prices; that consumers with lower inventory have a higher probability of purchasing; and that duration from previous purchase is shorter for purchases made during low prices and longer during high prices. The second essay examines competition in a dynamic setting between Wal-Mart and Target in the context of location choices and expansion strategies. Studying this topic sheds light on how an industry evolves and how the market structure is shaped by decisions such as when to enter and exit and where to locate new stores as well as the driving force behind different expansion strategies. One of the early papers by Bresnahan and Reiss (1991) study entry of retail and professional services into isolated markets in a one-shot game. In their model, firms are allowed to enter once and open one store. Collard-Wexler (2014) estimates a model of investment and entry in the ready-mix concrete industry. Again, each firm is assumed to own a single plant in the model. In my paper, I build a structural model in which firms can open multiple stores over a period of time. This setting is closer to reality as competition between firms lasts over many periods with firms making regular entry decisions and often opening multiple stores in the same market. I estimate how entry decisions are affected by competitor's presence and market characteristics and learn about the evolution of market structure and expansion strategies of the firms. The firms are forward-looking and engage in Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE) strategies. The results show that firm profits are affected asymmetrically by the competitor's presence. First, Wal-Mart is the dominant firm with higher profits regardless of Target's presence. On the other hand, Target's profits depend a lot on Wal-Mart's presence. It must have more stores than Wal-Mart (called store advantage) to profit. I also find asymmetry in the expansion strategies of the two firms. Wal-Mart tends to explore new and smaller markets by being the first and often the only firm to enter, while Target tends to focus on major markets with high population and GDP and strives to maintain store advantage over Wal-Mart by matching or outdoing Wal-Mart's decision to open new stores.
Author: Artak Meloyan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This dissertation consists of two chapters that try to examine the structural behaviour of firms with market power in two contexts: implicit collusion and merger. In the first chapter, we examine the implicit collusion in the U.S. corn seed market where several firms dominate the market and try to grasp consumer welfare. In these types of markets, firms can implicitly divide the market among each other and in each of these submarkets gain market power by offering different products than their competitors. Thus, the implicit collusion can potentially increase their market power. We show the difference in SPNE of implicit collusion between duopoly and oligopoly and examine whether or not there is evidence of implicit collusion in setting prices or product lines in the case of oligopoly. Results indicate that there is significant collusion in not only price setting stage, but also in product line choosing stage. The second chapter evaluates the impact of mergers on market prices through two different channels: efficiency gain vs. market concentration. We develop a theoretical model for firm's merger behavior, derive the equilibrium market prices both before and after the merger and decompose the total price change into two components: those due to the efficiency gain and those due to the market concentration. Then we apply the model to the case of a merger in mayonnaise market in 2015 to conduct empirical analyses using price-quantity data in the U.S. mayo market from 2013 to 2017. Results show a negative relationship between efficiency gain and market prices and positive relationship between market concentration and market prices. However, the efficiency gain effect outweighs the market concentration effect in the mayonnaise industry which leads to price decrease as a result of the merger.
Author: Jie Feng (Ph.D.)
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ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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My dissertation makes empirical and theoretical contributions to exploring firms' optimal strategy when demand uncertainty exists in correlated markets and information signals during the decision process. With the application to the U.S. soybean seed market, I illustrate methods to evaluate the leveraged market power within the soybean seed market and correlated herbicide market under the technology improvement and climate change. The first chapter studies firms' pricing strategies when demand changes in the correlated market. The demand change is patent expiration in my situation. Firms holding multiple patents may face similar antitrust challenges as multi-product monopolists do. I first build a theoretical model to elaborate on the impact of demand change under different scenarios where patents are valid, expired, or partially expired. Then I generate the theoretical hypothesis to empirically test the firm's pricing strategy before and after the patent expiration using the U.S. soybean market data. The empirical analysis found evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions. The price of the patented soybean seeds increased after the patent on a complementary pesticide product expired. On the contrary, the price of the patented seed decreased when the patent of a substitute seed technology expired. In both cases, the change in seed price is greater when the seed demand is more inelastic. I also found evidence that firms' vertical structure matters and evidence of geographical heterogeneity. The second chapter takes the angle of individual farmers' decision process and examines how their agronomic practices would be affected by technology advancement, climate change, and their interactions. In my case, the specific agronomic decision is economic optimal soybean seed density. Agronomic research finds that economically optimal seeding rates have likely increased for many U.S. farmers because of genetic improvements, including new genetically engineered traits. At the same time, the soybean seeds experienced a decreasing trend in seeding rates with the introduction of herbicide-tolerant traits. To understand its underlying mechanism, I first derive a per acre demand model for soybean seeds to reveal the underlying structural relationship of the seeding rates with the relative seed price, the technology, and other factors. Then I classify all the factors into the market factors, such as the seeds' market prices, technology factors, including the GE HT traits, information factors, and efficiency factors. I empirically test their effects on the expected seeding density using the U.S. soybean data from 1996 to 2017. I also examine the heterogeneity of the impacts across different regions, between conventional and HT seed adopters and heterogeneous farmers on different seeding density quantiles. My third chapter describes firms' optimal strategy under different vertical structures where the complementary market has demand uncertainty. When innovation in essential products ties with the demand of its complementary market, the complementary market variation and information induced consumers' beliefs could determine consumers' demand for essential products. This chapter proposes a theoretical model to analyze firms' optimal pricing strategies when complementary demand uncertainty and imperfect substitutes both exist. The theoretical model suggests that the new cost-saving product's equilibrium price and market structure depend on the expected loss value of the technology, the influence of the complementary market, the cost-saving ratio between the old and the new technology, and the market structure of the essential product. I also calibrate the model using the U.S. soybean data and recover the estimated value of the expected cost and the cost-saving ratio of the HT soybean farmers from 1996 to 2017 and illustrate the possible data to obtain for further empirical exploration.
Author: Leslie Margaret Schenk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business enterprises
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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