Industrial Organization Commons^™

Corporate Humanitarian Partnerships, Rebecca C. Keyes

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Coupons-Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

The Business Of Coupons--Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Abstract:

In recent years, couponing has emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon. Businesses of all types are taking advantage of this resource by revamping their out-dated programs and turning them into something fresh to excite customers. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning the viability, profitability, and usefulness of coupons. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of coupons in enticing return purchases in the soft-drink category. The dataset is comprised of household level grocery store transactions complied by dunnhumby for 2,500 households over a period of two years. An ordinary least squares regression technique is employed to analyze the ...

Endogenous Transaction Cost, Specialization, And Strategic Alliance, Yi Zhang, Juyuan Zhang

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

In property rights theory, firm is an organizational response to reduce transaction cost associated with hold-up of using market mechanism. We claim that strategic alliance { without changing firm boundaries or asset ownership { is another type of organizational response. We construct a model to investigate individual firms' strategic choice on specialization or diversification when producing intermediate products and their further choice of organizational form: autarchy or forming strategic alliance. We introduce fixed learning costs as an indicator of scales of economy and show that only if fixed learning costs are large enough, will firms have incentive to be specialization and form ...

What Are The Effects Of Mergers In The U.S. Airline Industry? An Econometric Analysis On Delta-Northwest Merger, Jiajun Liang

The Macalester Review

The Delta-Northwest Merger in 2008 has significantly reshaped the airline market structure and raised public concerns regarding market dominance. In this study, I will employ OLS techniques to examine the effects of merger on airfares, using more than 1,000 observations from 2008 and 2009 airline markets. Results show the belief that unbalanced market share will lead to heightened airfares misleading and unreliable. There is no significant evidence suggesting positive or negative correlations between airport dominance and airfares.

New Silicon Valleys Or A New Species? Commoditization Of Knowledge Work And The Rise Of Knowledge Services Clusters, Stephan Manning

Management and Marketing Faculty Publication Series

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most projects if ...

Bowling Green Industrial Foundation - Bowling Green, Kentucky (Sc 787), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Small Collection 787. Promissory note, signed 1 April 1940, by Emmons O. Pearson, Jr., and stock certificate issued by Bowling Green Industrial Foundation, 13 May 1943, to Pearson (1 share). Also included are newspaper clippings about the Bowling Green Industrial Foundation and its plans
concerning building and highway constructions.

Optimal Licensing Contract Under Private Information And Weak Intellectual Property Rights, Aniruddha Bagchi

Aniruddha Bagchi

I consider a model of licensing in a regime of weak patents when the innovator has private information about the quality of its technology. In this scenario, the innovator has to signal the quality of its technology by choosing an appropriate two-part tariff and the number of licensees. I determine the contract in a separating equilibrium as well as in a pooling equilibrium. In contrast to the literature, I find that the royalty rate in a separating equilibrium is 0. Thus, the innovator charges only an upfront fee from each licensee, and this amount is the same for every type ...

Price Competition With Optimal Product Demonstrations, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton, Haresh Gurnani

Raphael Boleslavsky

We develop a game theoretic model of price competition in which an innovating firm can offer product demonstrations. Placing minimal restriction on the firm's ability to design demonstrations, we show that the equilibrium demonstration resolves some but not all customer valuation uncertainty and allows the innovating firm to attract customers while maintaining a high price. Consumer surplus may be lower with endogenous demonstrations than without demonstrations. Regulation requiring firms to provide fully-informative demonstrations (e.g., generous return policies or inspection periods) can further reduce consumer surplus. The ability to design demonstrations also creates incentives for innovating firms to limit ...

Price Competition With Optimal Product Demonstrations, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton, Haresh Gurnani

Christopher Cotton

We develop a game theoretic model of price competition in which an innovating firm can offer product demonstrations. Placing minimal restriction on the firm's ability to design demonstrations, we show that the equilibrium demonstration resolves some but not all customer valuation uncertainty and allows the innovating firm to attract customers while maintaining a high price. Consumer surplus may be lower with endogenous demonstrations than without demonstrations. Regulation requiring firms to provide fully-informative demonstrations (e.g., generous return policies or inspection periods) can further reduce consumer surplus. The ability to design demonstrations also creates incentives for innovating firms to limit ...

The Pros And Cons Of Outsourcing, Angela Smith

UNLV Theses/Dissertations/Professional Papers/Capstones

Outsourcing has become increasingly popular to the public since the mid-20th century and has become more controversial in the last decade. The United States economy has been under the microscope for the last 4 years due to an economic recession. Outsourcing has been a subject of interest that has been brought up numerous times by economists. Offshore outsourcing is the main type of outsourcing that is of concern in relation to the United States economy. This topic is highly debated because of the unemployment rate in America.

Pricing Lower Or Buying Cheaper? How Grocery Consumers Pay Less During Seasonal Demand Peaks, Colin Watson

Undergraduate Economic Review

The average price paid for a seasonal grocery category is (surprisingly) lower during the category's seasonal demand peak. For several product categories at one supermarket chain, demand peaks are shown to be associated with 1) consumer substitution to lower-quality products, 2) product price reductions, especially on products that increase their market shares, and as a result 3) a decline in the average price paid for the product category. In one very seasonal category, price reductions are driven by intertemporal substitution associated with large weekly discounts. Findings are consistent with any of several loss leader models.

Essays On Industrial Organization And Environmental Economics, Cristina Marie Reiser

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine how regulation by a central authority motivates changes in behavior.

Chapter 1 identifies the role of a tolerance policy as a manager’s regulatory mechanism which can deter worker misconduct in rank-order tournaments. When contestants’ actions cannot be perfectly monitored or doing so is prohibitively costly, misconduct takes place. This chapter develops a theoretical model in which contestants compete for a prize in a symmetric tournament and in which the organizer tolerates some level of misconduct. In addition to showing that zero tolerance does not minimize equilibrium misconduct, it also shows there ...

Optimal Licensing Contract Under Private Information And Weak Intellectual Property Rights, Aniruddha Bagchi

Aniruddha Bagchi

No abstract provided.

Lobbying And The Adoption Of Medical Technology Under Certificate Of Need Laws, Aniruddha Bagchi, Govind Hariharan, Timothy Mathews

Aniruddha Bagchi

This paper theoretically analyzes the impact of lobbying under the Certificate of Need (CON) laws on the allocation of new technology in the healthcare industry. Under the CON regulations, any hospital planning to acquire new expensive technology is required to obtain approval from the government. An intriguing aspect of this law is that any interested party is allowed to object to a proposal from a competitor. An implication of this system is that resource allocation decisions are influenced by lobbying. We use a stylized model to examine the role of lobbying under the CON Law. The model is a two ...

Grade Inflation And Education Quality, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton

Christopher Cotton

We consider a game in which schools compete to place graduates in two distinct ways: by investing in the quality of education, and by strategically designing grading policies. In equilibrium, schools issue grades that do not perfectly reveal graduate abilities. This leads evaluators to have less-accurate information when hiring graduates. However, compared to fully-revealing grading, strategic grading motivates greater investment in educating students, increasing average graduate ability. Allowing grade inflation and related grading strategies can increase the probability evaluators select high-ability graduates.

Submission Fees And Response Times In Academic Publishing, Christopher Cotton

Christopher Cotton

Both submission fees and response times enable editors to maintain an acceptable refereeing burden by discouraging the submission of articles with low probability of eventual acceptance. When authors differ in their ability or willingness to pay submission fees or deal with delays, journal quality is maximized under a combination of moderate fees and moderate delays.

Workplace Deviance And Recession, Aniruddha Bagchi

Aniruddha Bagchi

No abstract provided.

Second Chance Offers In Auctions, Aniruddha Bagchi, Brett Katzman, Timothy Mathews

Aniruddha Bagchi

This paper examines situations in which a seller might make a second chance (take-it-or-leave-it) offer to a non-winning bidder at a price equal to their bid at auction. This study is motivated by the take-it-or-leave-it second chance offer rules used by eBay and a number of state procurement agencies. Equilibrium bidder behavior is determined for IPV sealed bid first price, second price, English, and Vickrey auctions when a second chance offer will be made with an exogenous probability p. In all but the Vickrey auction (which elicits the dominant strategy of bidding one’s value) equilibrium bids are lower than ...

Workplace Deviance And Recession, Aniruddha Bagchi, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay

Aniruddha Bagchi

We examine the relationship between the incidence of workplace deviance (on-the-job crime) and the state of the economy. A worker's probability of future employment depends on whether she has been deviant as well as on the availability of jobs. Using a two period model we show that the net impact on deviant behavior to changes in unemployment can go either way depending upon the nature of the equilibrium. Two kinds of equilibria are possible. In one, a non-deviant's probability of being employed increases as expected market conditions improve which lowers the incentive to be a deviant. In contrast ...