Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1987. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Includes bibliographies. / by Mark Stegeman. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-104). / by Mitali Das. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics and Social Science, 1960. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [491]-500). / by John Herbert Gillespie Crispo. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation consists of three chapters in Industrial Economics. Chapter 1 is the product of joint work with Filippo Balestrieri. In chapter 1 we examine the use of lotteries among horizontal differentiated goods as a mechanism to price discriminate consumers. We use the linear city model to represent a market with two differentiated goods. We show that the optimal selling strategy for a multi product monopolist implies offering at least one lottery with probability 1/2. This result is in stark contrast with the the optimal selling strategy of a single product monopolist that attempts to price discriminate consumers based on the probability of delivering the good. Riley and Zeckhauser (1983) show that the single good monopolist does not offer lotteries. We then examine the use of lotteries among the differentiated goods in the case of a market with two competing firms, each one producing one good. We define two different cases depending on whether the market is fully covered. We call fully covered market the case in which the equilibrium prices of the two firms are such that all consumers buy one good. We show that if the market is fully covered, no lotteries are offered in equilibrium. However, when the market is not fully covered the optimal selling strategy may include offering lotteries. With more than two firms selling differentiated goods, even in a fully covered market, lotteries can be used in equilibrium. In this case, firms might be worse off than in the case where no lotteries are provided. Chapter 2 examines firms optimal pricing policy when they sell a storable good of repeated consumption to time-inconsistent consumers. Consumers with time-inconsistent preferences might struggle to make optimal consumption decisions over time. Sophisticate consumers, aware of their time-inconsistent preferences, often try to limit their consumption of certain goods by strategically rationing the quantities they purchase. / (cont.) On the other hand, naive consumers, unaware of their time-inconsistent preferences, may stockpile tempting goods at "home" not realizing that the higher availability of the good might lead them to overconsume the good.It is shown that if consumers are time-consistent, quantity discounts don't increase the firms' profit. In contrast, if firms face naive time-inconsistent consumers, the optimal pricing policy is to use small quantity discounts as a device to increase sales. These consumers take advantage of quantity discount with the intention of saving on future purchases. However, after buying the good they can not resist and overconsume it. We also show that even if consumers are sophisticated, firms still use quantity discounts. Sophisticated time-inconsistent consumers realize that increasing the quantity purchased often leads them to overconsume the good. Hence, they require a significant quantity discount to increase the quantity purchased. Offering a quantity discount leads them to stockpile the good "at home" and hence promotes overconsumption. Chapter 3 analyzes the use of exclusive dealing agreements to prevent the entry of rival firms. An exclusive dealing agreement is a contract between a buyer and a seller where the buyer commits to buy a good exclusively from the seller. Exclusive dealing agreements are one of the most common vertical restraints used by firms. Aghion and Bolton (1987) were the first to show that an incumbent seller may want to use exclusive dealing agreement that prevents the entry of a rival seller. They argue that an incumbent seller and a buyer sign an exclusive dealing contract in order to extract surplus from a more efficient entrant seller. / (cont.) We propose an alternative explanation for the use of exclusive dealing agreements to prevent entry when the buyer is a downstream distributor that also faces the threat of entry. The idea is that the entry of more efficient upstream seller, by decreasing the market power of the upstream firms, makes entry in the downstream market more attractive. This can lead to further entry in the downstream market and to an increase in the competition faced by the downstream firms. Since part of the bigger surplus created by the entry of a more efficient seller is captured by the downstream entrant firms, entry in the upstream market does not necessarily benefits the incumbent downstream firms. / by Joao Leao. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Title as it appears in the Feb. 1993 MIT Graduate List: Down payments, house prices, and saving for home purchase. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 116). / by Gary Vincent Engelhardt. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 122-126). / The stringency of employment protection regulations varies substantially across countries. This thesis studies three mechanisms that can help explain the extent and persistence of this variation. The first chapter explores the ability of employment protection to generate its own political support. Using a version of the Mortensen-Pissarides model, I show that the presence or absence of this ability depends crucially on the features of wage determination. Under the standard assumption of continuous time Nash bargaining, workers value employment protection because it strengthens their hand in bargaining. Workers in high productivity matches benefit most. Yet employment protection shifts the distribution of match-specific productivity toward lower values and thus away from the supporters of regulation. Bilaterally inefficient separations are a feature of wage setting that can partially reverse this negative result. Now workers value employment protection because it delays involuntary dismissals. Workers in low productivity matches gain most since they face the highest risk of layoff. The shift of the productivity distribution toward lower values then becomes a shift toward supporters of employment protection. The second chapter puts forward a simple Ricardian argument suggesting that trade integration can sustain diversity in employment protection regulations. Trade integration enables a rigid country to specialize in activities less dependent on flexibility, mitigating the cost of rigidity. Conversely, it makes a flexible country less willing to become rigid, since doing so means forgoing the gains from trade induced by diverse regulation. / (cont.) This argument is evaluated in a dynamic model of labor turnover and employment protection. The third chapter presents an argument according to which employment protection is a policy that is difficult to introduce. If a country decides to introduce employment protection, it is reasonable to assume that firms can adjust employment levels before protection is actually implemented. Firms then have an incentive to dismiss some workers today in order to avoid high employment protection in the future. Anticipating this, these workers may oppose the introduction of employment protection. Delayed implementation can give rise to situations in which both low and high employment protection are stable political outcomes. / by Bjoren Axel Bruegemann. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1984. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEY. / Bibliography: leaves 168-173. / by Elizabeth Jane Jensen. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Neal J. Rappaport. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 1993. / Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 132-135). / by Michael Scott Gibson. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-104). / This dissertation addresses the potential agency conflicts arising between an insurance broker and its commercial clients. Though the broker is hired to find its client the best insurance quote on the market, the broker's contractual arrangements and private information may lead it to stray from this ideal. The first chapter introduces the institutions of commercial lines insurance in the interest of providing a foundation for the empirical inquiries to follow. The second chapter asks whether contingency fees, which are annual payments rewarding the broker for attaining premium volume and profitability targets with an insurer, distort the broker's sales behavior. The analysis uses data on policies written through a privately-held insurance broker in Arizona from 1994 to 2000. I am able to identify the effect of contingency fees because individual agents working at the broker make placement decisions, and only some agents have an incentive to respond to this compensation. Contingency fees are found to distort sales toward insurers that have contracts in effect at the broker. Moreover, agents appear to respond to contractual nonlinearities and are more inclined to place business with insurers offering high marginal incentives. The third chapter asks whether the broker can effectively communicate its private information to the client if it is in the broker's immediate interest to avoid costly search. The client would like the broker to search if the client's current insurer is no longer pricing its coverage competitively. In contrast, the broker would like to avoid costly search, while retaining the client. / (cont.) Thus, the broker has an incentive to distort the information provided to the client, always arguing that the client's current coverage is priced competitively. If search is only warranted when a client faces an idiosyncratic price increase, the moral hazard may still induce heightened search activity in response to systematic price increases. The broker cannot credibly communicate to the client the fact that all prices (not just its price) have increased. Using the data set employed in the second chapter, systematic price increases are found to significantly increase client turnover among insurers consistent with the moral hazard hypothesis. / by Jeffrey Mark Wilder. / Ph.D.