Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Economics. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Inaug.-diss.--Freiburg im Breisgau. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturangabe": p. [7]-8.

Thesis, PlanB (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Computer Science, 2005. Thesis (B.A.)--Haverford College, Dept. of Economics, 2005 / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2005. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-91). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This thesis consists of three separate papers which examine different aspects of the economics of online commerce. The first paper studies a natural experiment in the release of a new ad targeting feature onto an online advertising platform. The experiment affects the specificity of advertising assets in certain geographic ad markets. The paper finds evidence that the additional specificity negatively affects auction participation in the treated areas, an effect that has not been anticipated by the incumbent theoretical literature. The paper also finds evidence that despite negatively affecting auction participation, the additional specificity leads to higher revenue growth for the online platform in the treated areas. The paper's results highlight the importance of considering entry and exit decisions in theoretical models of specificity choices by market designers. The second paper uses a proprietary data set from Google to find that online trade between two US states or two Canadian provinces is 6.7 times higher than trade between a US state and a Canadian province. This finding is surprising given that in the online environment, information costs and business-to-business transactions involving intermediate inputs are largely absent. When disaggregating the data by sectors of economic activity, the study finds that the largest US-Canada border effects occur for services whose consumption is tied to a particular location and goods that face large regulatory hurdles at the border. The third paper analyzes geographical patterns of cross-country Internet transactions using proprietary data from Google. The paper finds the effect of distance on online trade to be around -0.53. The study also finds that cultural characteristics, such as shared languages or religions, have a large impact on e-commerce, while economic ties, such as a common currency, have an insignificant effect. The paper underlines the importance of accounting for selection into trade in worldwide gravity estimations and identifies two exclusion restrictions that can be used when examining online trade flows.

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Thesis advisor: Michael Grubb / Thesis advisor: Lucas Coffman / What You Don’t Know Can’t Pass Through: Consumer Beliefs and Pass-through Rates I model consumer search with imperfect information about firms’ costs and test predictions about consumer beliefs and pass-through in the US residential mortgage market. In the model, when consumers are unaware of an increase in costs, a high price would be surprising and may induce additional search. In equilibrium, sellers do not pass though the entire change in costs, and average pass-though is decreasing in consumer uncertainty about costs. The model provides a unified explanation for a number of patterns in pass-through rates including incomplete pass-through (passthrough rates less than one), pass-through over-shifting (pass-through rates greater than one), and asymmetric pass-through (greater pass-through rates for cost increases than decreases). I test a novel prediction of this model using confidential Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. I find that different components of the marginal cost of mortgage lending have different average pass-through rates. Widely known costs are passed through nearly completely while more obscure costs have much lower pass-through rates. This pattern is not explained by existing models of pass-through, as the standard determinants of pass-through are identical across all cost components of the same mortgage. People Don’t Demand Commitment Devices That Might Not Work Demand for costly commitment devices is rare. A possible explanation is that individuals are unaware of their present bias and their need for commitment. I run an experiment that successfully corrects subjects’ beliefs about their present bias and find that this increased awareness does not increase demand for commitment. These results, interpreted through the lens of a theoretical model of commitment demand, imply that low demand for commitment is not driven by a perceived lack of present bias, but rather subjects’ accurate belief that they may fail to follow through, even with the offered level of commitment. The Illusion of Competition with Michael Grubb Most existing models of price competition in the presence of search costs ignore the possibility that multiple products in a market are sold by the same firm. We develop a theoretical model of equilibrium price dispersion under costly consumer search over prices in the presence of jointly owned “brands.” We establish conditions on consumers’ search technology that determine consumer welfare implications and suggest antitrust remedies (e.g. post-merger consolidation of brands). / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

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