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Essays On Firm Strategies And Market Outcomes, Brady Thomas Vaughan

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

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. …

Essays On The Size Distribution Of Cities, Hiroki Watanabe

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation is comprised of three essays that analyze the spatial distribution of people and economic activities from three distinct perspectives.

Chapter 1: Explaining the Size Distribution of Cities: X-treme Economies. The empirical regularity known as Zipf's law or the rank-size rule has motivated development of a theoretical literature to explain it. We examine the assumptions on consumer behavior, particularly about their inability to insure against the city-level productivity shocks, implicitly used in this literature. With either self insurance or insurance markets, and either an arbitrarily small cost of moving or the assumption that consumers do not perfectly observe the …

Essays On Technology Adoption, Demographics, And Development, Ting-Wei Lai

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is to connect empirical findings with grounded theoretical analysis on two economic issues. One of the studies investigates industrial productivity by fitting in a theoretical model with quantitative methods. In addition, I explore how a demographic policy in China brings forth a profound impact in all aspects of the fast-growing economy.

The first chapter, ``Casual Labor, Uncertainty, and Technology Adoption in Agriculture," examines why both the technology adoption rate and labor productivity in agriculture are low in the context of developing countries. A two-stage model is built to explain how the availability of casual (non-permanent) labor ex-post, in …