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Author: Rong Luo
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Languages : en
Pages :
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This dissertation includes three chapters on estimating structural economics models. My research focuses on empirically study consumers' utility from different products, the impact of network effects on consumers' demand for products, and multi-network firms' dynamic pricing strategies. The three chapters share the same feature of estimating a discrete choice demand model, but differ in the static versus dynamic setting and the underlying economics question and strategic behaviors that I'm interested.Chapter 1"The Operating System Network Effect and Telecom Carriers' Dynamic Pricing of Smartphones."The utility a consumer realizes from owning a smartphone increases with its operating system (OS) network size. Due to this OS network effect, multi-network telecom carriers have a different pricing strategy for smartphones than the single- network manufacturers in a dynamic environment. While manufacturers choose higher prices for larger networks, carriers, who can internalize competition across OSs, have incentives to choose lower prices for larger networks. The carriers' pricing strategy contributes to the increasing smartphone users and OS concentration. In this paper, I first analyze a theoretical model to compare the pricing strategies of the carriers and manufacturers. Then I design a structural model of consumers' demand and the carriers' dynamic pricing game for smartphones, and empirically study the impact of the OS network effect and carriers' two-year contract policy on the smartphone market penetration and OS concentration. I estimate the model using product level data from August 2011 to July 2013 in the US. I deal with the empirical challenges of dynamic prices for multi-product carriers, high dimension continuous state variables, and asymmetric oligopolistic firms in the estimation. The results show that the OS network size has a positive and significant impact on consumer utility. I then study two counterfactual cases in which I eliminate the OS network effect and the carriers' pricing strategy, respectively. I find that, without the OS network effect, the smartphone penetration rate would decrease by 54.7% and the largest OS share difference decrease by 31.7% by May 2013. Without the carriers' pricing strategy, the penetration rate would decrease by 29.1% and the OS market share difference decrease by 11.2%.Chapter 2"The Operating System Network Effect and Consumers' Dynamic Demand of Smartphones with Two-Year Contracts."This paper studies consumers' dynamic demand of smartphones on two-year wireless contracts. Individuals' demand decisions are affected by the improving quality and changing prices of smartphones, and the OS network effect, and their current smartphone contract status. Consumers need to pay high early termination fees if they end active contracts. The dynamic demand model in this paper incorporates the evolving choice set, prices, endogenous OS network sizes, and the termination policies in the smartphone industry. The preliminary results find that the OS network effect is large and significant. In addition, compared with dynamic model results, a static demand model tends to underestimate the OS network effect and overestimate price coefficient.Chapter 3"Store Brands and Retail Grocery Competition in Breakfast Cereals."This paper empirically analyzes the impacts of store brands on grocery retailers and consumers in the market for breakfast cereals. On the supply side, store brands help a retailer to avoid direct competition with other retailers and change the set of retailer's products. On the demand side, introducing store brands changes the national brands prices and consumers' choice set. We analyze the effects via demand estimation for a single grocery store chain Dominick's at Chicago in 1997 and counterfactual exercises. The estimation results show that consumers' unobserved utility of buying at a competing retailer is higher for consumers that value national brands, and is lower for ones that value Dominick's store brands. This is consistent with the claim that store brands help a retailer to avoid competition. The counterfactual calculations show that the profit loss from removing store brands is higher if the retailer has more competitors, with a median loss of 4.33% of profits from cereals. Existence of store brands increases national brands prices and consumer welfare increases slightly when store brands are removed.
Author: Rong Luo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
Get Book Here
Book Description
This dissertation includes three chapters on estimating structural economics models. My research focuses on empirically study consumers' utility from different products, the impact of network effects on consumers' demand for products, and multi-network firms' dynamic pricing strategies. The three chapters share the same feature of estimating a discrete choice demand model, but differ in the static versus dynamic setting and the underlying economics question and strategic behaviors that I'm interested.Chapter 1"The Operating System Network Effect and Telecom Carriers' Dynamic Pricing of Smartphones."The utility a consumer realizes from owning a smartphone increases with its operating system (OS) network size. Due to this OS network effect, multi-network telecom carriers have a different pricing strategy for smartphones than the single- network manufacturers in a dynamic environment. While manufacturers choose higher prices for larger networks, carriers, who can internalize competition across OSs, have incentives to choose lower prices for larger networks. The carriers' pricing strategy contributes to the increasing smartphone users and OS concentration. In this paper, I first analyze a theoretical model to compare the pricing strategies of the carriers and manufacturers. Then I design a structural model of consumers' demand and the carriers' dynamic pricing game for smartphones, and empirically study the impact of the OS network effect and carriers' two-year contract policy on the smartphone market penetration and OS concentration. I estimate the model using product level data from August 2011 to July 2013 in the US. I deal with the empirical challenges of dynamic prices for multi-product carriers, high dimension continuous state variables, and asymmetric oligopolistic firms in the estimation. The results show that the OS network size has a positive and significant impact on consumer utility. I then study two counterfactual cases in which I eliminate the OS network effect and the carriers' pricing strategy, respectively. I find that, without the OS network effect, the smartphone penetration rate would decrease by 54.7% and the largest OS share difference decrease by 31.7% by May 2013. Without the carriers' pricing strategy, the penetration rate would decrease by 29.1% and the OS market share difference decrease by 11.2%.Chapter 2"The Operating System Network Effect and Consumers' Dynamic Demand of Smartphones with Two-Year Contracts."This paper studies consumers' dynamic demand of smartphones on two-year wireless contracts. Individuals' demand decisions are affected by the improving quality and changing prices of smartphones, and the OS network effect, and their current smartphone contract status. Consumers need to pay high early termination fees if they end active contracts. The dynamic demand model in this paper incorporates the evolving choice set, prices, endogenous OS network sizes, and the termination policies in the smartphone industry. The preliminary results find that the OS network effect is large and significant. In addition, compared with dynamic model results, a static demand model tends to underestimate the OS network effect and overestimate price coefficient.Chapter 3"Store Brands and Retail Grocery Competition in Breakfast Cereals."This paper empirically analyzes the impacts of store brands on grocery retailers and consumers in the market for breakfast cereals. On the supply side, store brands help a retailer to avoid direct competition with other retailers and change the set of retailer's products. On the demand side, introducing store brands changes the national brands prices and consumers' choice set. We analyze the effects via demand estimation for a single grocery store chain Dominick's at Chicago in 1997 and counterfactual exercises. The estimation results show that consumers' unobserved utility of buying at a competing retailer is higher for consumers that value national brands, and is lower for ones that value Dominick's store brands. This is consistent with the claim that store brands help a retailer to avoid competition. The counterfactual calculations show that the profit loss from removing store brands is higher if the retailer has more competitors, with a median loss of 4.33% of profits from cereals. Existence of store brands increases national brands prices and consumer welfare increases slightly when store brands are removed.
Author: Ralph C. Bayer
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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This paper analyzes dynamic pricing in markets with network externalities. Network externalities imply demand inertia, because the size of a network increases the usefulness of the product for consumers. Because past sales increase current demand, firms have an incentive to set low introductory prices to be able to increase prices as their networks grow. However, in reality we observe decreasing prices. This could be due to other factors dominating the network effects. We use an experimental duopoly market with demand inertia to isolate the effect of network externalities. We find that experimental prices are consistent with real world observations rather than with theoretical predictions.
Author: Lijia Ge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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In this paper, we formulate a differential game model to investigate firms' competition in both price and product R&D. The significant features of our research include: (i) incorporating the factor of network effects into the framework of continuous dynamic competition; (ii) considering the consumers' adaptive learning about the network size in the spirit of behavioral economics. Our analysis mainly suggests: (i) The network effects and consumers' adaptive learning comprehensively have negative effects on the result of price competition but has nothing to do with the result of R&D competition under duopoly, which is not true as the number of firms increases; (ii) the incentive to acquire competitors' state information is increasing with the intensity of network effects and the consumers' learning speed; (iii) when we consider the competition among more than three firms under feedback information structure, the competition intensity has negative effect on the steady-state quality stock; (iv) in a market where the consumers show strong price sensitivity, the product quality is under-provided compared with the first-best optimal level regardless of the choice of solution concept.
Author: David Prakash
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3754359932
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 156
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Digital technologies are driving the application of dynamic pricing. Today, this pricing strategy is used not only for perishable products such as flights or hotel rooms, but for almost any product or service category. With dynamic pricing, retailers frequently adjust their prices over time to respond to factors such as demand, their supply and that of competitors, or the time of sale. Additionally, dynamic pricing allows retailers to take advantage of a large share of consumers' willingness to pay while avoiding losses from unsold products. Ultimately, this can lead to an increase in revenue and profit. However, the application of dynamic pricing comes with great challenges. In addition to the technological implementation, companies have to take into account that dynamic pricing can cause complex and unintended behavioral consequences on the consumer side. The key objective of this dissertation is to provide a deeper understanding of the impact of dynamic pricing on consumer behavior. To this end, this dissertation presents insights from four perspectives. First, how reference prices as a critical component in purchase decisions are operationalized. Second, how customers search for products priced dynamically, differentiated by business and private customers, as well as by different devices used for the search. Third, whether and how dynamic pricing influences the impact of internal reference prices on purchase decisions. Finally, this dissertation demonstrates that consumers perceive price changes as personalized in different purchase contexts, leading to reduced perceptions of fairness and undesirable behavioral consequences.
Author: Luís M. B. Cabral
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Competition
Languages : en
Pages : 45
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Author: Lapo Filistrucchi
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 52
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We model a two-sided market with heterogeneous customers and two heterogeneous network effects. In our model, customers on each market side care differently about both the number and the type of customers on the other side. Examples of two-sided markets are online platforms or daily newspapers. In the latter case, for instance, readership demand depends on the amount and the type of advertisements. Also, advertising demand depends on the number of readers and the distribution of readers across demographic groups. There are feedback loops because advertising demand depends on the numbers of readers, which again depends on the amount of advertising, and so on. Due to the difficulty in dealing with such feedback loops when publishers set prices on both sides of the market, most of the literature has avoided models with Bertrand competition on both sides or has resorted to simplifying assumptions such as linear demands or the presence of only one network effect. We address this issue by first presenting intuitive sufficient conditions for demand on each side to be unique given prices on both sides. We then derive sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of an equilibrium in prices. For merger analysis, or any other policy simulation in the context of competition policy, it is important that equilibria exist and are unique. Otherwise, one cannot predict prices or welfare effects after a merger or a policy change. The conditions are related to the own- and cross-price effects, as well as the strength of the own and cross network effects. We show that most functional forms used in empirical work, such as logit type demand functions, tend to satisfy these conditions for realistic values of the respective parameters. Finally, using data on the Dutch daily newspaper industry, we estimate a flexible model of demand which satisfies the above conditions and evaluate the effects of a hypothetical merger and study the effects of a shrinking market for offline newspapers.
Author: Itay P. Fainmesser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 56
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This paper studies the practice of influencer marketing in oligopoly markets and its effect on market efficiency. We develop a duopoly model in which firms sell horizontally differentiated products. Consumers are influenced by other consumers' choices, and some consumers are more influential than others. Firms' influencer marketing strategy involves discovering the influence of a subset of consumers and price discriminating based on this information.In equilibrium, firms subsidize consumers whose influence is above average and charge premia to below average influential consumers; the equilibrium premia/discounts depend on the strength of network effects and the level of information that firms have on consumers' influence. From a normative perspective, we show that influencer marketing leads to inefficient consumer-product matches. Firms' investments in discovering consumers' networks are strategic complements, leading to a race for information acquisition that erodes total surplus and firms' profits but increases consumer surplus.
Author: Amir Ajorlou
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 59
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We study the problem of optimal dynamic pricing for a monopolist selling a product to consumers in a social network. In the proposed model, the only means of spread of information about the product is via Word of Mouth communication; consumers' knowledge of the product is only through friends who already know about the product's existence. Both buyers and non-buyers contribute to information diffusion while buyers are more likely to get engaged. By analyzing the structure of the underlying endogenous process, we show that the optimal dynamic pricing policy for durable products with zero or negligible marginal cost, drops the price to zero infinitely often. By attracting low-valuation agents with free-offers and getting them more engaged in the spread, the firm can reach out to potential high-valuation consumers in parts of the network that would otherwise remain untouched without the price drops. We provide evidence for this behavior from smartphone app market, where price histories indicate frequent free-offerings. Moreover, we show that despite infinitely often drops of the price to zero, the optimal price trajectory does not get trapped near zero. We demonstrate the validity of our results in face of strategic forward-looking agents, homophily-based engagement in word of mouth, network externalities, and consumer inattention to price changes. We further unravel the key role of the product type in the drops by showing that the price fluctuations disappear after a finite time for a nondurable product.
Author: Yangyang Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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In the traditional discrete choice model, we assume that consumers know the product attributes without uncertainty. Learning models extend the discrete choice model by assuming that consumers have incomplete information about product attributes and that they can gradually resolve the uncertainty as they receive more information about the product over time. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I conduct a survey on literature of empirical learning models. I distinguish the learning models into three categories. First, demand side learning models which focuses on the effect of different types of consumer learning on demand. Second, supply side learning models which studies the firm's strategies when it does not have full information of consumer demand. Third, consumer learning and firm's marketing strategies which focuses on the interaction of consumer learning and firm's strategies. Empirical learning models have been proved to be a fruitful area of research activity and consumer learning dynamics have been intensively investigated, but there are two areas for future research --- empirical models that combines consumer learning and firm dynamics and empirical models that feature both consumer learning and firm learning.
Author:
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ISBN:
Category : Dissertations, Academic
Languages : en
Pages : 688
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