Three Essays in the Economics of Food Marketing

Three Essays in the Economics of Food Marketing PDF Author: Xun Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Essays in the Economics of Food Marketing

Three Essays in the Economics of Food Marketing PDF Author: Xun Li
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Essays on Economics and Economists

Essays on Economics and Economists PDF Author: R. H. Coase
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226111032
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
How do economists tackle the problems of the economic system and give advice on public policy? Nobel laureate R.H. Coase reflects on some of the most fundamental concerns of economists over the past two centuries. In 15 essays, Coase explore the history and philosophy of economics and evaluates the contributions of a number of outstanding figures.

Essays on Economics and Marketing

Essays on Economics and Marketing PDF Author: Yu-Hung Chen (Economics scholar)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Chapter 1: Dynamic Pricing and Price Commitment of New Experience Goods An important problem for a firm selling new experience goods is how to credibly signal its high quality. This chapter develops a dynamic model to examine how a firm with a non-durable experience good can signal its quality with dynamic spot-pricing or future-price commitment. I find that when consumers do not believe the firms price commitment to be credible, the high-quality firms most profitable equilibrium outcome is to pool in the first period and separate in the second period. In contrast, when price commitment is credible, the high-quality firm may signal its quality with either a lower-than-first-best first-period price or a higher-than-first-best second-period price. Credible price commitment will benefit the high-quality firm by lowering its signaling cost and hurt the low-quality firm, but can either increase or decrease consumer surplus and social welfare depending on the quality difference between the two types of firms. Chapter 2: Dynamic Pricing of Experience Goods in Markets with Demand Uncertainty This chapter studies a firms optimal dynamic pricing strategies for its experience goods in markets, where the distribution of consumers valuations is ex ante unknown. I find several interesting findings. First, a high-quality firm can signal its quality with either a skimming-pricing strategy or a penetration-pricing strategy in the early period. Second, though a firm with higher quality benefits more from learning market demand, in equilibrium the low-quality firm not the high-quality firm will learn demand if consumers have very different willingness to pay. Third, although consumers have higher willingness to pay for the high-quality product, in the first period the high-quality firm may actually charge a lower price than the low-quality firm. Lastly, the firm may earn higher profits when its initial pricing decision is made under demand uncertainty than under no demand uncertainty. The underlying reason is that the presence of demand uncertainty can sufficiently lower the high-quality firms signaling cost, allowing it to make higher profits by setting future prices based on its high quality. Chapter 3: Who Benefits from Big Data Collected by In-Vehicle Data Recorders? The car insurance market is plagued with problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. In-vehicle data recorders can collect massive amount of information (or "big data") about the drivers risk factors and driving behaviors. This monitoring technology allows the firm to set its insurance premium based on better estimates of the drivers risk factors, alleviating the adverse selection problem. In addition, the firm can charge a premium based on the customers recorded driving behaviors; this helps to reduce the drivers moral hazard. I provide an analytical framework to examine the impact of such monitoring technology on the insurance firms and the consumers. My analysis shows that in a duopoly one firms adoption of the monitoring technology may benefit both firms because of the less severe competition in the market. Finally, I show that if one firm has adopted the monitoring technology, its competitor may have no incentive to adopt that technology even if it is free.

Microeconomics for Business and Marketing

Microeconomics for Business and Marketing PDF Author: Peter E. Earl
Publisher: Edward Elgar Pub
ISBN: 9781852788629
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
'Microeconomics for Business and Marketing is an extremely impressive piece of work. I would go so far as to say that it is without any doubt the best textbook on microeconomics which is available, both in terms of the range of material covered and in the way in which it is presented so clearly. 'It will be useful for non-specialist economics students, because it shows them that economics, when done properly, can say some interesting things without making ridiculous assumptions. and specialists will benefit from having such a wide range of material made accessible in a single text. I would recommend it without hesitation.' - Paul Ormerod, author of The Death of Economics and Consultant, Henley Centre for Forecasting Microeconomics for Business and Marketing is a wide-ranging, innovative textbook which will stimulate students and teachers alike. It will be of particular relevance to students of marketing, commerce and business strategy. Specifically designed with today's larger class sizes in mind, the book encourages students to question and to develop both analytical and written skills, as well as to use economics as a tool for problem solving.

Marketing and the Common Good

Marketing and the Common Good PDF Author: Patrick E. Murphy
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134091141
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
Marketing is among the most powerful cultural forces at work in the contemporary world, affecting not merely consumer behaviour, but almost every aspect of human behaviour. While the potential for marketing both to promote and threaten societal well-being has been a perennial focus of inquiry, the current global intellectual and political climate has lent this topic extra gravitas. Through original research and scholarship from the influential Mendoza School of Business, this book looks at marketing’s ramifications far beyond simple economic exchange. It addresses four major topic areas: societal aspects of marketing and consumption; the social and ethical thought; sustainability; and public policy issues, in order to explore the wider relationship of marketing within the ethical and moral economy and its implications for the common good. By bringing together the wide-ranging and interdisciplinary contributions, it provides a uniquely comprehensive and challenging exploration of some of the most pressing themes for business and society today.

The Meaning of the Market Process

The Meaning of the Market Process PDF Author: Israel M Kirzner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134915497
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Israel Kirzner is the foremost proponent of the modern Austrian theory of the market process. This book offers substantive insights in support of this theory and a new historical interpretation of how the ideas of modern Austrians emerged.

Essays in Industrial Organization, Marketing and Financial Economics

Essays in Industrial Organization, Marketing and Financial Economics PDF Author: Toker Doganoglu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages :

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The Morals of Markets and Related Essays

The Morals of Markets and Related Essays PDF Author: Harry Burrows Acton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
The Morals of Markets offers a philosophically and historically informed defense of a market-based form of social organization. Acton discusses the profit motive, competition, monopoly, the supposed impersonality of the marketplace, the assumed chaos of markets, self-interest, egalitarianism, central planning, and distributive justice. For all their high moral tone, Acton concludes the criticisms leveled and the political platforms proffered against free markets are full of contradictions and unanalyzed assumptions. A particular strength of Acton's book is that he is himself something of a moral traditionalist.

Essays in Marketing, Economics, and Optimization

Essays in Marketing, Economics, and Optimization PDF Author: Ding Ma
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This thesis includes four self-contained essays on marketing, economics, and optimization, all sharing a common theme: creating numerical models and algorithms to tackle computationally challenging optimization problems. The first essay considers geographic sub-branding via manufacture location in marketing. Manufacture location, as part of geographic product identity, is becoming a significant differential factor among a variety of products and a sub-branding element in various markets, but there is little empirical research on how manufacture location influences consumer preference and purchase choices. The first barrier comes naturally from the market. Most of the time, manufacture location is completely correlated with product characteristics. I was fortunately able to acquire both data and a whole year research grant from Ford Motor Company. New car buyer data in the Chinese automobile market makes possible the analysis of manufacture location as a geographic sub-branding element. Hedonic price analysis gives us a quick and intuitive view of how much consumers are willing to pay for geographic sub-branding products, and also motivates our new brand and sub-brand definition for a BLP-type random coefficient discrete choice model. However, using General Method of Moments (GMM) to estimate the variance-covariance matrix of consumer brand taste coefficients poses another challenge for all existing optimization solvers. To prevent indefinite unknown variance-covariance matrices in the constraints of the optimization problem from terminating the solver, I reformulate the optimization program and successfully solve the problem. If the computation becomes more difficult, we can also apply our new algorithm NCL, which is described in details in the third essay. Our results reveal the strong substitution patterns in the market and confirm our definition and framework of brand and geographic identity. Furthermore, our method can be helpful in the analysis of branding and sub-branding in other empirical settings. The second essay studies optimal income taxation with multidimensional taxpayer types in economics. This engendered the subject of the third essay: stabilized optimization via an NCL algorithm in numerical optimization. The income taxation literature has generally focused on economies where individuals differ only in their productivity, i.e., income. In reality, people differ in many ways. In our models, we consider people's productivity, basic needs, distaste for work, the elasticity of labor supply, and the elasticity of demand for consumption. We find that extra dimensions give us substantially different and interesting results. In certain cases, high-productivity people may pay negative tax. Therefore, considering income taxation in multiple dimensions is essential, and again is computationally challenging. All existing optimization solvers fail to find optimal solutions. Eventually, we transformed the model, created a new algorithm (NCL), and solved the high-dimension difficult optimization problems. The nonlinearly constrained augmented Lagrangian algorithm (NCL) we created was motivated by the bound-constrained and the linearly constrained augmented Lagrangian algorithms (BCL and LCL). To facilitate implementation, we take advantage of the mathematical programming language AMPL. We did not have to write fifty thousand lines of Fortran code to implement NCL. The third essay on algorithm NCL was published this year in Numerical Analysis and Optimization. The taxation part remains as a working paper. I am excited about not only solving the complex income taxation models, but also creating a general algorithm that can be applied to tough mathematical models in different fields. For instance, our algorithm NCL can be easily adapted to nonlinear pricing in economics and marketing. The fourth essay considers reliable and efficient solution of genome-scale models of metabolism and macromolecular expression. For many years, scientific computing has advanced in two complementary ways: improved algorithms and improved hardware. In order to solve the large and complicated biochemical network of metabolism in systems biology, we made use of improved machine precision and created algorithms utilizing software-simulated quadruple precision arithmetic and successfully solved both original and reformulated optimization models. This essay is published in Scientific Reports. Today, our linear and non-linear quadruple precision solver quadMINOS is supporting the research of systems biologists in their COBRA (COnstraint-Based Reconstruction and Analysis) Toolbox, and it can also help researchers in many other areas. As my advisor Professor Michael Saunders predicts: ``Just as double precision floating-point hardware revolutionized scientific computing in the 1960s, the advent of the quadruple precision data type, even in software, brings us to a new era of greatly improved reliability in optimization solvers.''.

Essays on Quantitative Marketing and Economics

Essays on Quantitative Marketing and Economics PDF Author: Nan Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
In two essays, I present my work that applies empirical method to real-world problems in quantitative marketing and economics. In the first chapter, I use structural econometrics to investigate airlines' dynamic price competition. I show how widely-used dynamic pricing techniques affect firms profits under a competitive equilibrium. The second chapter is a joint work with Zemin Zhong. We focus on how China's anticorruption effort impact its economy, measured by car consumption and new business registration. Dynamic pricing is becoming a common practice in many industries, but its effect under competition is uncertain due to the potential for the Prisoner's dilemma. The paper studies profit and welfare implications of competitive dynamic pricing in the context of the airline industry. The paper develops a structural dynamic oligopoly model where firms compete in selling limited capacities when facing demand fluctuations. The supply and demand are jointly estimated using a unique daily-level data on airfares and capacity utilization. The identification leverages a natural experiment of carrier exit. The estimates show that air travel demand exhibits a large degree of temporal heterogeneity and stochastic variability. The counterfactuals show that the ability to perform dynamic pricing increases total welfare. In particular, (i) price discrimination (charging late-arriving consumers higher prices) softens competition in the late market and increases profits substantially and (ii) revenue management (pricing on remaining capacities) intensifies competition and does not increase profits. Corruption could either benefit economic growth by “greasing the wheel,” or distort supply of public goods and create inefficiency. Empirically testing the impact of corruption is difficult due to its evasive nature. We take an alternative approach by investigating the economic impacts of anti-corruption policies. We focus on China's recent anti-corruption campaign, the largest of its kind in recent history. As an important initiative of this campaign, the Communist Party's Provincial Committees of Discipline Inspection (PCDI) send inspector teams to investigate municipal governments for potential corruption. The variation in their timing allows us to use a difference-in-difference design to identify their impact on local economy. Using two unique administrative datasets of vehicle and business registration, we find that PCDI visits have a negative impact on both car sales and new business entry. For vehicles, the effect is surprisingly uniform across different price tiers: Luxury brands exhibit a similar drop as domestic brands, suggesting corruption's impact permeates households across a wide income spectrum. Over time, the effect is strengthening: We observe a 2\% drop in the first three months of PCDI visit and a 10\% drop one year afterward. The especially large impact cannot be explained by the decline in government officials' consumption behavior, suggesting anti-corruption efforts also affect the private sector. We test the idea using business registration data, and we found PCDI visits indeed discourage new business registration. We validate our empirical strategy by showing that (1) the timing of PCDI visits cannot be predicted by observable county characteristics and (2) car registrations exhibit parallel pre-treatment trends. Our results suggest there may be a trade-off in anti-corruption and economic growth.