Essays on Multi-product Firms' Strategic Behavior Under Demand Uncertainty PDF Download

Author: Jie Feng (Ph.D.)
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Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
My dissertation makes empirical and theoretical contributions to exploring firms' optimal strategy when demand uncertainty exists in correlated markets and information signals during the decision process. With the application to the U.S. soybean seed market, I illustrate methods to evaluate the leveraged market power within the soybean seed market and correlated herbicide market under the technology improvement and climate change. The first chapter studies firms' pricing strategies when demand changes in the correlated market. The demand change is patent expiration in my situation. Firms holding multiple patents may face similar antitrust challenges as multi-product monopolists do. I first build a theoretical model to elaborate on the impact of demand change under different scenarios where patents are valid, expired, or partially expired. Then I generate the theoretical hypothesis to empirically test the firm's pricing strategy before and after the patent expiration using the U.S. soybean market data. The empirical analysis found evidence consistent with the theoretical predictions. The price of the patented soybean seeds increased after the patent on a complementary pesticide product expired. On the contrary, the price of the patented seed decreased when the patent of a substitute seed technology expired. In both cases, the change in seed price is greater when the seed demand is more inelastic. I also found evidence that firms' vertical structure matters and evidence of geographical heterogeneity. The second chapter takes the angle of individual farmers' decision process and examines how their agronomic practices would be affected by technology advancement, climate change, and their interactions. In my case, the specific agronomic decision is economic optimal soybean seed density. Agronomic research finds that economically optimal seeding rates have likely increased for many U.S. farmers because of genetic improvements, including new genetically engineered traits. At the same time, the soybean seeds experienced a decreasing trend in seeding rates with the introduction of herbicide-tolerant traits. To understand its underlying mechanism, I first derive a per acre demand model for soybean seeds to reveal the underlying structural relationship of the seeding rates with the relative seed price, the technology, and other factors. Then I classify all the factors into the market factors, such as the seeds' market prices, technology factors, including the GE HT traits, information factors, and efficiency factors. I empirically test their effects on the expected seeding density using the U.S. soybean data from 1996 to 2017. I also examine the heterogeneity of the impacts across different regions, between conventional and HT seed adopters and heterogeneous farmers on different seeding density quantiles. My third chapter describes firms' optimal strategy under different vertical structures where the complementary market has demand uncertainty. When innovation in essential products ties with the demand of its complementary market, the complementary market variation and information induced consumers' beliefs could determine consumers' demand for essential products. This chapter proposes a theoretical model to analyze firms' optimal pricing strategies when complementary demand uncertainty and imperfect substitutes both exist. The theoretical model suggests that the new cost-saving product's equilibrium price and market structure depend on the expected loss value of the technology, the influence of the complementary market, the cost-saving ratio between the old and the new technology, and the market structure of the essential product. I also calibrate the model using the U.S. soybean data and recover the estimated value of the expected cost and the cost-saving ratio of the HT soybean farmers from 1996 to 2017 and illustrate the possible data to obtain for further empirical exploration.