Dokument: Three Essays in Industrial Organization
| Titel: | Three Essays in Industrial Organization | |||||||
| URL für Lesezeichen: | https://docserv.uni-duesseldorf.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=40753 | |||||||
| URN (NBN): | urn:nbn:de:hbz:061-20161221-111612-7 | |||||||
| Kollektion: | Dissertationen | |||||||
| Sprache: | Englisch | |||||||
| Dokumententyp: | Wissenschaftliche Abschlussarbeiten » Dissertation | |||||||
| Medientyp: | Text | |||||||
| Autor: | Hasnas, Irina [Autor] | |||||||
| Dateien: |
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| Dewey Dezimal-Klassifikation: | 300 Sozialwissenschaften, Soziologie » 330 Wirtschaft | |||||||
| Beschreibung: | This dissertation presents three essays in Industrial organization. In the first two essays I analyze, how the availability of data on consumer preferences influences strategic decisions of the firms, such as where to locate and whether to collude. In the last essay I analyze, whether full or partial collusion is more stable when firms are heterogeneous in the quality of their products.
In Chapter 2, I analyze firms' location choices in a Hotelling model with two-dimensional consumer heterogeneity, along addresses and transport cost parameters (flexibility). Firms can price discriminate based on perfect data on consumer addresses and (possibly) imperfect data on consumer flexibility. I show that firms' location choices depend on how strongly consumers differ in flexibility. Precisely, when consumers are relatively homogeneous, equilibrium locations are socially optimal regardless of the quality of customer flexibility data. However, when consumers are relatively differentiated, firms make socially optimal location choices only when customer flexibility data becomes perfect. This analysis is motivated by the availability of customer data, which allows firms to practice third-degree price discrimination based on both consumer characteristics relevant in spatial competition, addresses and transport cost parameters. Chapter 3 discusses the sustainability of collusion in a game of repeated interaction where firms can price discriminate among consumers based on the same two types of customer data described in Chapter 2: firms have perfect data on consumer addresses, data on their flexibility is imperfect. Three collusive schemes are considered to analyze the impact of the improvement in the quality of customer flexibility data on firms' incentives to collude. The results in this chapter support the findings in the literature that with the improvement in data quality it is more difficult to sustain collusion. Unlike the previous two chapters, Chapter 4 describes three firms heterogeneous in their quality located on a Salop circle. The quality gap among these firms emphasizes the quality difference between branded manufacturer products and private label products. In this chapter, I analyze the incentives to collude when brand manufacturers compete with a private label producer of inferior quality. Full collusion is easier to sustain than partial collusion from the brands' perspective when horizontal differentiation is large and vertical differentiation is small. The private label firm is better off under full collusion than under partial collusion if goods are sufficiently homogenous (horizontal and/or vertical). Improving the private label's quality makes full collusion more likely, either because it relaxes the brand producers' incentive constraint or because it shifts the preference of the private label firm from partial collusion to full collusion. Fully collusive behavior reveals itself through a nonnegative price effect on the brands' side caused by a quality increase of the private label good. | |||||||
| Lizenz: |  Urheberrechtsschutz | |||||||
| Fachbereich / Einrichtung: | Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät » Volkswirtschaftslehre | |||||||
| Dokument erstellt am: | 21.12.2016 | |||||||
| Dateien geändert am: | 21.12.2016 | |||||||
| Promotionsantrag am: | 01.10.2011 | |||||||
| Datum der Promotion: | 30.11.2016 |
