Essays on simultaneous search equilibrium PDF Download

Author: Ronald Paul Wolthoff
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9051709285
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 195

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Author: Philipp Kircher
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Author: Garth Baughman
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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This dissertation considers three separate applications of the theory of search and matching equilibria. The first chapter considers a partnership formation game, where agents on two sides of a market need to find a partner before a deadline, and search frictions make it difficult to find an acceptable partner. I characterize agents acceptance decisions -- those with whom they would be willing to match -- show existence, and provide a condition for uniqueness of equilibrium. This study provides a step towards a better understanding of matching behavior in non-stationary environments where agents have persistent type. The second chapter in this dissertation considers the import of adverse selection in a modern model of directed search in labor markets. Competition in this market drives firms to offer contracts that increase over time, limiting turnover. Adverse selection does not perturb contracts for less attractive types, but leads more attractive workers to accept initially low wages that grow faster than they would under full information. The final chapter of this dissertation explores the import of sequential search behavior in a model of equilibrium price setting by multi-product firms. On the one hand, the market produces results which affirm the common empirical focus on marginal distributions of individual goods' prices across firms. On the other, when some firms do not offer every good, search behavior leads to interesting pricing patterns which would not occur in single-product markets.

Author: Alexei Parakhonyak
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9036101786
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 139

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Author: Silva Deželan
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9051708289
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 157

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Information is crucial to make good decisions, but obtaining and providing information often comes at a cost. Consumers and firms both need to balance these costs and benefits of obtaining and providing information in order to make the best decisions. The research in this thesis investigates several questions that pertain to the acquisition and provision of information. In the first part of this thesis it is assumed that consumers are not fully informed about the prices or availability of a product they want to buy. Consumers can search for information, but this comes at a cost. At the same time, shops can influence these costs. In the first two studies in this part, shops have the possibility to advertise. An advertisement provides information to consumers and reduces the search costs. We investigate, among other things, the pricing behavior of shops and the relation between search and advertising. The third study in this part of the thesis considers the location choice of shops. Locating together in a shopping mall reduces the search costs of consumers. This increases the competition between shops and lowers the prices, but we show that at the same time the sales volume increases. The total effect of locating together on profits is generally positive. The second part of this thesis considers director ties (also named interlocks). A director who has several directorships in different firms can serve as an information bridge between the different firms. At the same time, interlocking directors are busy and form a homogenous group. Data from the Netherlands show that in The Netherlands the positive information providing effect of interlocks is outweighed by a negative busyness and homogenous group effect.

Author: Bert Tieben
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9036101093
Category : Equilibrium (Economics)
Languages : en
Pages : 592

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Author: Wiroy Shin
Publisher:
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Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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This dissertation consists of two chapters.Chapter 1: On Monotone Strategy Equilibria in Simultaneous Auctions for Complementary GoodsWe explore existence and properties of Bayesian Nash equilibrium in simultaneous first-price auctions for complementary goods. We introduce a novel partial order on bidder types and apply methodology in Athey (2001), McAdams (2003) and Reny (2011) to demonstrate existence of monotone equilibria in these auctions when the bid space is finite. We then apply this finding to demonstrate two new results on monotone equilibria in continuous bid spaces. The first of these establishes existence of monotone equilibria in a setting similar to Krishna and Rosenthal (1996), in which a single global bidder bids for multiple objects against a set of local bidders who bid for single objects only. The second considers equilibria with communication as in Jackson, Simon, Swinkels and Zame (2002), showing that in our setting their statements on distributional strategies can be refined to be monotone. Finally, we discuss conditions under which these results can be extended to all-pay, second-price and other standard simultaneous auctions.Chapter 2: Discrimination in OrganizationsA number of the largest U.S. firms have been involved in labor discrimination despite having policies in place designed to avoid that outcome. This paper diagnoses the phenomenon and proposes contractual and regulatory solutions to ameliorate the situation. Existing research (e.g., Becker (1957), Coate and Loury (1993)) studies a situation in which an individual person practices discrimination. In contrast, this paper considers a hierarchical organization in which a manager (the agent) may or may not have a discriminatory taste toward his subordinates, whereas an owner (the principal) is unbiased and only cares about profit. The manager perfectly observes productivity levels of the subordinates and decides whom to promote. The owner only sees results of the managers decision: the promoted workers identity and that workers performance. In this environment, I study a direct mechanism and characterize an optimal contract. Additionally, I compare the allocation implemented by the optimal direct mechanism to the first-best (full information) allocation and discuss the effectiveness of current regulations (e.g., affirmative action, taxation on the minority promotion ratio): I find that a regulator (such as the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) can improve compliance with non-discriminatory conduct, despite the fact that the person on whom the regulation is directly incidentthe principalis not intrinsically biased. I also show that the regulation can be counter-productive if it attempts to enforce perfect fairness (the first-best allocation) when that allocation is not incentive feasible. Finally, I review the U.S. law of discrimination and analyze statutory and jurisprudential issues regarding the optimal mechanism.

Author: Xing Zhang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Essay I: A full equilibrium approach is proposed in this paper to estimate the distribution of consumer price search costs when (i) consumers adopt sequential or non-sequential search strategy and, (ii) consequently firms adopt a mixed pricing strategy. We model jointly the distributions of prices and sales when the market is at equilibrium. The major methodological challenge is that we have to model the distribution of prices instead of a single optimal price. To solve this problem, we use the non-parametric Maximum Empirical Likelihood estimator (Owen 1988) in model estimation. Through a series of simulation studies, we show that modeling the interplay between firms' pricing strategy and consumers' price search strategy is critical in order to correctly infer the search cost distribution. Finally, we apply the method to a dataset provided by a firm in a B-to-B market, and find that our model can explain the observed variation in prices and transactions, and recover reasonably well the supply cost of the firm. Essay II: In this paper we empirically examine the effect of buyers' cost of price search on firms' pricing strategy in a B-to-B market. We propose a full equilibrium approach to simultaneously model the observed price variation and transactions in the market, where buyers engage in costly price search and as a result firms adopt a mixed pricing strategy. Estimation results provide evidence that buyers in our data sequentially sample prices as this model out-performs another classical non-sequential search model in terms of recovering the "kink" price distribution (probability mass being highly concentrated at some price points) and the true supply cost in our data. We then illustrate how a lower search cost distribution (lower mean) can support a mixed price equilibrium with a higher average price, suggesting that the common belief of lower search costs leading to lower prices can be misleading. Finally, we extend our model framework to study how keyword search advertising may influence firms' prices and profits. By placing advertisement at the top of a search page, we assume an advertiser differentiates from other firms as the first place to start searching for some buyers. We find that the advertiser will charge the lowest price when the proportion of buyers using keyword search is from small to medium but, as the proportion further increases it will eventually charge at the highest price. Measuring the profit difference between the advertiser and non-advertising firms will help infer the willingness-to-pay for search advertising.

Author: Xiaolong Liu
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9036101999
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Author: Hui-Ting Wu
Publisher: Rozenberg Publishers
ISBN: 9036101913
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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