Industrial Organization Commons^™

Hunting Unicorns, Aaron Edlin

Aaron Edlin

Book Reviews, Usawc Press

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Article Index, Usawc Press

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Uncertainty, Depreciation And Industry Growth, Roberto Samaiego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

When investment is irreversible, firms invest only when the mismatch between their productivity and their capital stock is large. This suggests that two factors should be related to the frequency of mismatch: volatility and capital depreciation. A canonical model of industry dynamics with investment irreversibility displays slow growth in times of high uncertainty, and decline is particularly pronounced in industries where capital depreciation is rapid. A differences-in-differences regression using industry growth data from a large sample of countries supports this result.

The Historical And Legal Creation Of A Fissured Workplace: The Case Of Franchising, Brian Callaci

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the consequences of institutional change in capitalist firms, focusing on vertical dis-integration, the legal boundaries of the firm and what David Weil has called workplace "fissuring," in which corporations place intermediaries (subcontractors, temp agencies, or franchisees) between themselves and workers, often with negative consequences for workers. It focuses specifically on franchising, a type of fissured workplace in which one firm outsources retail operations to smaller, legally independent franchisees. The first chapter uses archival sources to identify the legal and policy changes driving workplace fissuring in the franchising context: specifically the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints …

Introduction To The Special Issue On The Blue Economy Of Bangladesh, Pawan G. Patil, Pierre Failler, Khurshed Alam

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

Introduction to the Special Edition on the Blue Economy of Bangladesh by the Editors of the Special Edition.

Essays On The Economics Of Digital Piracy, Zhuang Liu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis consists of three chapters relating to the economics of digital piracy. Digital piracy is a debated topic catching tremendous academic and public attention. My studies contribute to the understanding of the impact of digital piracy on legitimate sales revenue with a focus on the motion picture industry.

In my first chapter, I examine the effects of screener piracy on the movie box office. Screeners are movie copies sent to critics and industry professionals for evaluation purposes. Sometimes, screeners are leaked and made available to download on the Internet. This chapter exploits the plausibly exogenous variation of file sharing/piracy …

The Effect Of Latest Shipping Alliance On Shipping Industry, Lingjie Li

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Research On Double-Stack Container Transport Organization In International Multimodal Transport, Xi Zhu

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Oppressive Pressures Of Globalization And Neoliberalism On Mexican Maquiladora Garment Workers, Jenna Demeter

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

The international economic trends of globalization and neoliberalism have exposed and enabled the exploitation of Mexican workers, especially women in the maquiladora garment industry. During the 1950s, globalization gave rise to the new international division of labor and transnational corporations (TNCs) that have offshored labor-intensive phases of production to developing countries, many of which have pursued export-led industrialization. Export processing in Mexico was encouraged in the 1960s by Item 807 of the U.S. Tariff Code and Mexico’s Border Industrialization Program. Especially following the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, advanced capitalist countries and International Financial Institutions foisted neoliberal structural …

Natural Gas Investment In West Virginia, 2010-2016, Eric Bowen

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

West Virginia’s natural gas boom began in 2010 as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling techniques began to be applied to the state’s shale formations. Since then, West Virginia has become the nation’s ninth-largest natural gas producer in 2017, with gross withdrawals of more than 1.6 trillion cubic feet. Since the gas boom started, the natural gas industry has made considerable investments in the state to pay for well drilling, mineral royalties, and pipeline infrastructure, among other investment costs. In this report, we estimate these investments in two key areas: upstream costs and midstream infrastructure.

On The Optimality Of One-Size-Fits-All Contracts: The Limited Liability Case, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

Tax Uncertainty And Business Activity, Jungho Lee, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We investigate the extent to which uncertainties about tax policies affect business activities. We develop a statewide tax-uncertainty measure (TU measure) and show that it captures state corporate tax uncertainty. By comparing adjacent counties across state borders, we show that increasing tax uncertainty by one standard deviation (a 30% increase in the TU measure) leads to a 0.17% point per-year decrease in the growth rate of establishments over two years. The result holds after conducting a variety of robustness checks and is not likely to be driven by general state-policy uncertainties.

Public Interests And Economic Regulation Of Gambling, Rein Halbersma, Joost Poort

International Conference on Gambling & Risk Taking

In the Netherlands, the Betting and Gaming Act from 1964 largely determines the current structure of gambling markets. The policy was to channel consumers to a limited number of licensed operators. This led to state-owned monopolies for lotteries, sports betting and casinos, a private monopoly for horse race betting, a limited number of privately owned charity lotteries, and a large number of private slot machines operators.

Pending legislation proposes an online market without a limit on the number of operators. Furthermore, state ownership will be phased out, and introduced legislation to privatizing and expanding the number of casinos. The current …

Apple V. Pepper: Rationalizing Antitrust’S Indirect Purchaser Rule, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

In Apple v. Pepper the Supreme Court held that consumers who allegedly paid too much for apps sold on Apple’s iStore could sue Apple for antitrust damages because they were “direct purchasers.” The decision reflects some bizarre complexities that have resulted from the Supreme Court’s 1977 decision in Illinois Brick, which held that only direct purchasers could sue for overcharge injuries under the federal antitrust laws. The indirect purchaser rule was problematic from the beginning. First, it was plainly inconsistent with the antitrust damages statute, which gives an action to “any person who shall be injured in his business …

Box Office Showdown: How Does Movie Market Saturation Affect First Weekend Box Office Revenues?, Matthew Steele

Economics Honors Projects

The scheduling of release dates for feature films is among the most important decisions that movie studios make in the life cycle of a movie. While the economic literature on the movie industry has largely focused on modeling the box office success of a movie based on its own characteristics—star power, critical reception, and trailer data—there is a dearth of literature concerning the way that competition from within the industry affects box office revenues. This article primarily uses a propensity score matching model to fill a gap in the literature, establishing causal relationships between different forms of competition and first …

Strategic Ignorance In Sequential Procurement, Silvana Krasteva, Huseyin Yildirim

Huseyin Yildirim

The Warren Campaign’S Antitrust Proposals, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust policy promises to be an important issue in the 2020 presidential election, and for good reason. Market power measured by price-cost margins has been on the rise since the 1980s. Presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren has two proposals directed at large tech platforms. One would designate large platform markets such as Amazon “platform utilities,” and prohibit them from selling their own merchandise on the platform in competition with other retailers. The other proposes more aggressive enforcement against large platform acquisitions of smaller companies.

This paper concludes that the first proposal is anticompetitive, leading to reduced output and higher prices …

Pro-Social Consumer And Firm Behavior In Imperfectly Competitive Regional Agricultural Markets, Jill Fitzsimmons

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I combine field research, econometric methods, and economic theory to analyze a market in which both firms’ and consumers’ choices are motivated by social preferences. This work contributes to the fields of behavioral economics, industrial organization, and local food systems economics. The dissertation expands the growing literature on social preferences to incorporate firms’ choices that are motivated by utility maximizing objectives in an environment that allows endogenous equilibrium prices and quantities. Firms with social preferences operate in a competitive environment in which they may face downstream market power. In particular, the research focuses on intermediated Farm to …

Does Foreign Direct Investment Lead To Industrial Agglomeration?, Wen-Tai Hsu, Yi Lu, Xuan Luo, Lianming Zhu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on industrial agglomeration.Using the differential effects of FDI deregulation in 2002 in China on different industries, we find that FDI actually affects industrial agglomeration negatively. This result is somewhat counter-intuitive, as the conventional wisdom tends to suggest that FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster for various agglomeration benefits, in particular technology spillovers. To reconcile our empirical findings and the conventional wisdom, we develop a theory of FDI and agglomeration based on two counter-veiling forces. Technology diffusion from FDI attracts domestic firms to cluster, but fiercer competition drives firms away. Which …

Three Essays In Industrial Organization, Yiyi Hu

Economics Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation includes two papers about issues in two-sided markets and one paper discussing hierarchical Stackelberg model.

Chapter 1 analyzes endogenous horizontal product differentiation in a two-sided market with two platforms based on a two-stage Hotelling model. When the two sides are both single-homing, the platforms will choose maximal product differentiation in the equilibrium. However, when one side is multi-homing, and the multi-homing side views the platforms indifferent, the platforms choose minimal product differentiation in the equilibrium.

Chapter 2 investigates horizontal mergers in a two-sided market between three horizontally differentiated platforms. This chapter provides a theoretical analysis of impacts on …

Price Discrimination On Complementary Goods: Evidence From The Men's Shaving Razor Market, Zheng Yang

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation analyzes the men's razor market to examine whether a monopolist can implement price discrimination for the complementary goods. I estimate a demand system for razors using the random coefficient logit model with market level sales data from the Nielsen Store Scanner dataset and individual demographic data from the March CPS. The estimated parameters are used to construct price-cost markups. By comparing the markups of different products, I find evidence that Gillette uses a two-part tariff strategy. This conclusion can be generalized as that of a monopolist setting the prices of tie-in products consistent with a two-part tariff.

Intellectual Property And The Economics Of Product Differentiation, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The literature applying the economics of product differentiation to intellectual property has been called the most important development in the economic analysis of IP in years. Relaxing the assumption that products are homogeneous yields new insights by explaining persistent features of IP markets that the traditional approaches cannot, challenging the extent to which IP allows rightsholders to earn monopoly profits, allowing for sources of welfare outside of price-quantity space, which in turn opens up new dimensions along which intellectual property can compete. It also allows for equilibria with different welfare characteristics, making the tendency towards systematic underproduction more contingent and …

The Impacts Of Supra-Regional Multi-Resort Season Passes: A Hedonic Pricing Model Of Single-Day Lift Tickets For Us Ski Areas, Sijia Lai

CMC Senior Theses

Numerous media analyses claim that supra-regional multi-resort season passes (mega passes) are negatively impacting skiing, snowboarding, and winter-sport communities. In particular, media claims that ski areas on these season passes are charging higher single-day lift ticket prices to nudge people to buy their season pass products. To test this claim, I use a hedonic pricing model to estimate the impact of season passes on adult single-day lift ticket prices. By applying OLS regressions to a dataset of 302 US ski areas for the winter of 2018-19, I find that the ski areas on the leading season passes (Ikon and Epic …

Essays On Price Discrimination And Demand Learning, Benjamin E. Wallace

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation consists of three essays examining how and why firms set prices in markets. In particular, this dissertation shows how firms may utilize nonlinear pricing to price discriminate, how firms may experiment with the prices they set to learn about the demand function in the market they serve in later periods and the effects of these pricing strategies on consumer welfare.

In Essay 1, I show how firms in the milk market use nonlinear price schedules -- quantity discounts -- to price discriminate and increase profits. I find that firms have a greater ability to price discriminate on their …

Economic Impact Of Ethanol Biorefineries In The U.S. Midwest From 2001 To 2015: A Quasi-Experimental Approach, Scott W. Hall

Theses and Dissertations--Agricultural Economics

The objective of this dissertation is to analyze the economic impact of newly operational ethanol biorefineries on rural counties in the U.S. Midwest region for the period 2001 to 2015 using a quasi-experimental approach. Rapid growth in the ethanol industry expanded the number of ethanol plants located in the U.S. Midwest from 54 in 2001 to 173 in 2015. Out of the counties with 119 new ethanol biorefineries, 97 counties met the general treatment criteria defined in this dissertation, but only 56 of those counties qualified for the rural treatment criteria. Counties with ethanol biorefineries that qualified for treatment were …

Huge In France: Explaining French Underperformance In The International Box Office, Jay D. Rosenstein

Senior Projects Spring 2019

In the face of near complete American dominance of the global film industry, the French have adopted a number of policies to protect their domestic industry. This project provides a history of public intervention in the French film industry, a theoretical framework to explain American dominance and the possibility of French competition, and finally an empirical evaluation of the French policy of public intervention. It finds significant evidence that public spending has a depressing effect on the size of movies on the upper end of the budget spectrum, but perversely that increasing the proportion of public spending on film increases …

Intellectual Property And Competition, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

A legal system that relies on private property rights to promote economic development must consider that profits can come from two different sources. First, both competition under constant technology and innovation promote economic growth by granting many of the returns to the successful developer. Competition and innovation both increase output, whether measured by quantity or quality. Second, however, profits can come from practices that reduce output, in some cases by reducing quantity, or in others by reducing innovation.

IP rights and competition policy were traditionally regarded as in conflict. IP rights create monopoly, which was thought to be inimical to …

Investigating The Effect Crime Has On Uber And Yellow Taxi Pickups In Nyc, Kebing Li

Honors Theses

How to manage the relationship between Uber and the local taxi industry has been a long-lasting and hot topic for most of the major cities around the world. Whether Uber is stealing money from and undermining the local taxi drivers or it is beneficial for public transportation has no certain conclusions. In this paper, we focus on the city of New York, where both Uber and traditional Yellow Taxi play important roles in public transportation and city culture in general, and we are trying to investigate the factors that are going to affect Uber and Yellow Taxi pickups in New …

Is Antitrust's Consumer Welfare Principle Imperiled?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Antitrust’s consumer welfare principle stands for the proposition that antitrust policy should encourage markets to produce output as high as is consistent with sustainable competition, and prices that are accordingly as low. Such a policy does not protect every interest group. For example, it opposes the interests of cartels or other competition-limiting associations who profit from lower output and higher prices. It also runs counter to the interest of less competitive firms that need higher prices in order to survive. Market structure is relevant to antitrust policy, but its importance is contingent rather than absolute – that is, market structure …