published_or_final_version / Statistics / Master / Master of Philosophy

Optimization of materials supply and inbound logistic operations has become increasingly important as firms have continued to pursue outsourcing options. Further, the proliferation of products and advances in information technology have greatly impacted retailers’ marketing strategies in the past decade. In this dissertation, we address how to optimally develop integrated sourcing and delivery planning, and how to optimally offer vertically differentiated products and bundles. In the first essay, we address a combined sourcing and delivery planning optimization problem, which is motivated by a practical problem facing materials and supply planners for construction projects in a leading corporation. We develop a decision support model and an effective solution approach for integrated sourcing and delivery planning for bulk materials. This approach, implemented and currently in use at the company to support material delivery planning for track maintenance projects, has yielded significant savings of millions of dollars annually. In the second essay, we study the problem of a retailer managing a category of vertically differentiated products. We consider two settings: the exogenous prices case and the endogenous prices case. In the former case, the selling prices are exogenously determined and the retailer’s only decision is to determine the set of products to offer. In the latter case, the retailer also determines the selling prices. We develop efficient methods to identify the optimal solutions for both cases and provide valuable insights and guidelines for practitioners. In the third essay, we study how to choose the optimal bundling strategy for a retailer offering vertically differentiated information goods. We characterize conditions under which pure bundling and mixed bundling strategies are optimal respectively. We provide efficient methods to identify which individual components to offer, whether or not to offer a bundle containing all the components and how to price the offered individual components and the bundle in order to maximize the retailer’s profit. / text

In this dissertation I focus on two considerations that influence the product strategy of a firm. The first is consumers’ choice and its influence on a firm’s product offering, and the second is the interaction between durable products and their contingent consumables. First, I study the assortment planning problem for a firm; I illustrate the complexity of solving this product selection problem, present simple solutions for some commonly used choice models, and develop heuristics for other practically motivated models. Second, I study the incentives of a durable goods monopolist when she can lock-in consumers through a contingent consumable. Adopting a lock-in strategy has two interesting effects on the incentives of a durable goods manufacturer. On one hand, by locking-in consumers to its consumable, a durable goods monopolist can curb its temptation to reduce durable prices over time, thereby mitigating the classic time inconsistency problem. On the other hand, lock-in will create a hold-up issue and adversely affect consumers’ expectations of future prices for the consumable. My research demonstrates the trade-off between time inconsistency and hold-up, and derives insights about the conditions under which a lock-in strategy can be effective. I further analyze the trade-off between time inconsistency and hold-up associated with lock-in in the presence of consumable stock-piling. My findings indicate in the presence of consumer stock-piling, lock-in has an effect similar to that of competition in the consumables market: they help to dampen the hold-up problem that arises from lock-in and at the same time increase the manufacturer’s incentive to reduce durable prices over time. / text

Social, political, and economic trends suggest that the United States may soon join other United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) countries in drafting substantive, national climate change policy. After providing a brief overview of past and present climate action taken both nationally and internationally, this paper explores different economic solutions to address the externalities of fossil fuel emissions. Alternatives include command-and-control regulation, a carbon tax, and a cap-and-trade program. Several factors, including domestic political anti-tax sentiment, suggest that a cap-and-trade framework is the most promising market-based alternative to reduce carbon emissions within the United States’s electricity sector. Case studies focus on the power generation components of four Texas utilities: Austin Energy, CPS Energy of San Antonio, NRG Energy, and Luminant and assess cap-and-trade’s ramifications on electricity prices. Utilities would seek to pass through to customers in the form of higher electricity prices up to 100 percent of expenses incurred from mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Three primary factors will determine how a given carbon dioxide cap-and-trade allowance price will affect the electricity price charged by utilities: the carbon intensity of the generation fuel mix, whether the wholesale electricity market is regulated or competitive, and whether greenhouse gas allowances are auctioned or grandfathered to covered entities. Consumer elasticity would determine resulting demand for the higher priced energy. Relatively inelastic electricity consumption could cause electricity sector customers to incur financial losses approximately eight times larger than producers by the year 2020 under a mature cap-and-trade framework. Furthermore, evidence suggests market-based GHG reduction tools such as a cap-and-trade schema alone are not sufficient to decarbonize the electricity generation sector. Without complementary regulatory policies that mandate transition to clean energy sources, cap-and-trade will only succeed in redistributing the opportunity cost associated with the carbon externality. / text

This item was digitized as part of the Million Books Project led by Carnegie Mellon University and supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Cornell University coordinated the participation of land-grant and agricultural libraries in providing historical agricultural information for the digitization project; the University of Arizona Libraries, the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and the Office of Arid Lands Studies collaborated in the selection and provision of material for the digitization project.

A dynamic IS-LM model including stocks and houses as additional assets will be analyzed in this paper. Providing also housing services, a major consumption item for most households, houses create an additional link between the monetary and the real sector of the economy. The adjustment path of output, house prices and stock prices after exogenous policy shocks will be derived within a rational expectation setup. This will show how different reaction patterns of asset prices are related to different elasticities of housing services demand. These general analytical results are contrasted with relevant empirical work, particularly Lastrapes [2002], leading to the identification of plausible elasticity ranges. The particular results for those shed new light upon the ongoing discussion about demand effects from real estate wealth and about determinants of house price fluctuations. (author's abstract) / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

This study investigated the demand patterns of poor households during a period of rising prices. Focus was on three main constructs namely the poor, rising prices and the demand patterns. The study was on Bophelong, a township in South Africa. This study was conducted from an empirical, quantitative approach which was preceded by a literature review. The main objective of conducting the literature review was to provide a theoretical framework for questionnaire design and empirical work. Cross sectional data was collected at Bophelong households. On completion of the survey, the poor were selected from the non-poor by means of a poverty line. The poor were further divided into two categories, namely moderately poor and the very poor. Moderately poor households were categorised by an income ranging 50% to 99% inclusively of their household poverty line. The very poor households were categorised by an income in the range of 0 to 49% inclusively of their poverty line. Using the above division, the total poverty rate was 56% of the total sample, 26% being moderately poor and 30% very poor. The poverty gap ratio for all the poor in the sample was 0.48, meaning that on average, the poor needed 48% of their current income to reach their poverty line. This ratio was 0.29 for the moderately poor households and 0.69 for the very poor households. A logistic regression done on the determinants of poverty in Bophelong showed that household size, age of the household head, monthly household income and the employment status of the household head were significant in determining poverty. The monthly average household income in Bophelong was R2 910. For the moderately poor households it was R1 641 for the and R932 for the very poor households. Household size was 3.96 for the whole sample size, 2.97 for the non-poor households, 4.2 for the moderately poor households and 4.7 for the very poor households. The study revealed that demand patterns of the poor differ from those of the non-poor. In addition the moderately poor households‟ demand patterns differ from the very poor An analysis of the poor‟s demand patterns during rising prices: the case of Bophelong household. The greatest part of income of the poor is spent on basic food stuffs. The very poor spent more than half of their income (53%) on food. The study indicated that bread is a giffen good only to the very poor households where quantity demanded moves in the same direction with price. In the non-poor households, bread is regarded inferior. A commodity can be overly a necessity, but the degree of necessity differs with a households‟ economic status. In some cases, a commodity was a necessity in the very poor households but a luxury in the non-poor. The way households substitute one good for another depends on their income levels. In conclusion, the study recommends that for poverty alleviation policies to effectively target the very poor in reducing malnutrition and hunger, these very poor should be studied separetely from the poor households. This is because households of different poverty levels face different challenges. A more detailed and deeper study relating to the demand structure of the poor is recommended. There is also a need to explore the survival means of the poor as to direct policy actions aimed at alleviating poverty among the poor in general. / Thesis (PhD (Economics))--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

Försäljningspriser på den svenska bostadsmarknaden tenderar att i allt högre grad avvika från fastighetsmäklarnas utgångspriser. En förklaring till detta är att fastighetsmäklare inte omedelbart anpassar sig till en stigande prisnivå. Syftet med denna uppsats är att förklara vilka faktorer hos bostadsrätter som är svåra för fastighetsmäklare att värdera i en marknad med stigande priser. Undersökningen är begränsad till att endast behandla fastighetsanknutna faktorer. Genom syftet vill vi bidra till en bättre förståelse kring hur köpares betalningsvilja skiljer sig från fastighetsmäklares värdering i en sådan marknad. För att uppnå syftet har en kombination av kvantitativ och kvalitativ metod använts. Undersökningen baseras på 112 bostadsrätter avyttrade under en tidsperiod av sex efterföljande kalendermånader i Karlstad, Sverige. Grunden till undersökningen är de utvalda bostadsrätternas objektsbeskrivningar. Genom analys av samtliga objektsbeskrivningar och respektive bostadsrätts prisutveckling utifrån utgångspris till försäljningspris har resultat kring faktorer som är svåra att värdera uppnåtts. Resultatet visar att nästan samtliga undersökta faktorer inom värdeteorin är överrepresenterade hos bostadsrätterna med hög prisutveckling. Den faktor med högst representation bland bostadsrätter med en hög prisutveckling är förekomsten av både kakel och klinker i badrum. Tidigare forskning visar att ett väl underhållet och modernt badrum är av stor vikt för köparen. Läget, som enligt teorin är den viktigaste faktorn för en bostads värde, visar i undersökningen inte lika hög överrepresentation hos bostadsrätter med hög prisutveckling mätt i avstånd till kommunikationsmedel och dagligvaruhandel. Detta behöver dock inte betyda att läget inte är den viktigaste värdeskapande faktorn, utan att fastighetsmäklare är väl medvetna om lägets betydelse och således kan värdera denna faktor rätt. Andra faktorer som ingått i undersökningen är antal rum, standard i kök, balkong/uteplats, våningsplan, utsikt över vatten, parkeringsmöjlighet, månadsavgift samt kakelugn/öppen spis. En slutsats är att fastighetsmäklare har svårt att, i en marknad med stigande priser, följa med i utvecklingen och utföra enligt marknaden korrekta värderingar. Undersökningen visar förekomsten av faktorer som fastighetsmäklare värderar korrekt samtidigt som det finns vissa faktorer med större betydelse för köpare, vilket bidrar till att försäljningspriset väsentligt avviker från utgångspriset. / The prices of residentials on the Swedish housing market tends to increasingly deviate from the list price. One explanation is that real estate agents not immediately adapt to the rising prices. The purpose of this paper is to describe the factors of condominiums which are especially difficult for real estate agents to valuate in a period with rising prices. This paper is limited to discribe only the factors related to the condominiums. By this purpose, we want to contribute to a better understanding of how customers’ willingness to pay differs from real estate agents valuation. To fulfill the purpose both a quantitative and a qualitative method has been used. The survey is based on 112 condominiums sold during a period of six following months in Karlstad, Sweden. The basis for the survey are the prospects of the selected condominiums. Through analysis of the prospects and the respective tenant price trends, results about specific factors difficult to valuate are achieved. The result shows that almost all investigated factors in the theory of value are overrepresented among the condominiums with high price trends. The factor that has the highest connection with a high price trend is the presence of both wall and floor tiles and/or clinker in the bathroom. Previous research says that a well-maintained and modern bathroom is important for the buyer. The location, which according to the theory is the most important factor for a residential value, does not show equal high connection according to the survey. This does not clearly mean that the location not is the most important value influcencing factor, rather that real estate agents are well aware of the importance of the location and therefore can valuate this factor correctly. Other factors involved in the survey are the number of rooms, standard in kitchen, presence of balcony/patio, storey, view, parking, the monthly fee and the presence of a stove/fireplace. A conclusion is that real estate agents faces difficulties that in a market with rising prices valuate residential properly and keep up with developments in the market. There are some factors that real estate agents are valuing correctly while other factors have greater importance for buyers and thus contribute to a significantly increase from the initial list price to the selling price.

The airline industry is a major user of jet fuel and this constitutes a large component of the operating costs and is a risk coefficient for airlines. Several studies have been conducted on how oil price volatility affect stock prices and cash flows as well as how, in general, firms that uses derivatives experience lower stock returns volatility and stock s .The impact of oil price volatility on airline stock s and the impact of hedging on airline stock s have not been adequately examined, this paper fills this gap. By gathering daily frequency of oil spot prices to access the quarterly oil price volatility and stock s from 16 European airlines, we correlate quarterly oil price volatility to quarterly airline stock s as well as stock s and hedging percentages between 2010-2015, we reject the hypothesis that oil price volatility has an impact on airline stock s and that hedging reduces stock s. These findings therefore suggest that oil price volatility do not have a large impact on systematic risks or that hedging offset systematic risks. The findings are of interest to investors who want to make well informed investment decisions based on non-diversifiable equity risk since it has become popular for management recently to implement hedging policies to signal competency in risk management in order to attract investments.

The present paper explores the effects of championships won and financial stability of the clubs on share price returns for publicly traded football clubs in Europe. The study uses samples from 2012-2017 of 14 publicly traded clubs on different exchanges such as Borsa Italiana, London Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, Germany Stock Exchange, Paris CAC Index, Borsa Lisbon, Copenhagen Stock Exchange as well as the Turkish Stock Exchange. The initial analysis assesses share price returns’ links with team performance and team financial variables as well as two indices: STOXX 600 Market Index and the STOXX Football Index. Further analysis includes looking at revenues and the different variables that affect returns to see the correlation and understand profitability vs win maximization due to the effect of sugar daddy owners. There appears to be a negative and significant correlation between profit margin and returns, and I also conduct event studies for the biggest transfers of the clubs and conclude that in the short term, there is a significant effect on share prices when transfers occur.