M.S.

This study investigates the effects of competition on the pricing behavior of defense contractors. Prior research in this area has indicated a potential for significant price reductions associated with competition. Pricing data for five dual source subsystems of the AIM-9M Sidewinder missile were examined. Key findings of the study include: • The introduction of a second source led to increased price reductions by the first source; • The first source exhibited a greater price sensitivity to lot quantity changes than the second source: • The second source was immediately price competitive with the first source; and, • Each subsystem showed evidence of gaming. / Master of Arts

With the exception of a brief legislative stay of execution, resale price maintenance (RPM), has been illegal per se in the United States since a 1911 Supreme Court decision. The Court has however, afforded vertical territorial restraints the protection of the rule of reason. A growing body of economic literature has proposed numerous pro-competitive uses of RPM by manufacturers. In addition, the literature indicates that vertical territorial and vertical price restraints are both different means of achieving the same end i.e., both are economic tools employed by manufacturers to achieve efficiencies in their distribution system. Opponents of RPM counter this assertion by arguing that if both are identical economic phenomenon, then manufacturers have no need to employ RPM since they can use vertical market division in its place. In this paper I will show that under demand conditions characterized by the outlets hypothesis, RPM is Pareto-superior to vertical market division. It is equally possible to imagine market conditions under which the opposite is true. Since the court room is an ill-suited home for such business decisions, the law should not continue to maintain its present artificial distinction between RPM and vertical market division. The economic consequences of both are essentially the same, hence, I advocate that RPM also be brought under the protection of the rule of reason. / Master of Arts / incomplete_metadata

M.S.

M.S.

The problem considered in this study arose from the need for an emperlcal analysis of the sale value of land to determine if the increased price benefits of the governmental flue-cured tobacco program have been absorbed by higher land rents. If acreage allotments giving the right to produce tobacco under the program are capitalized into farmland values to an appreciable extent, the program objective of increasing farm incomes would be partially defeated through higher rents. The objective of this study was to determine the extent to which allotments have been capitalized into land values. Data on sale value of farms and factors expected to influence the farm sale value were secured from primary public record sources for the four-year period from 1954 to 1957 in two distinctly different flue-cured tobacco regions--Pittsylvania County, Virginia, and Wilson, Greene, and Pitt Counties, North Carolina. These data were analyzed by a multiple regression statistical technique designed to measure the value of an acre of tobacco allotment es a right to produce. The statistical coefficients indicated that an acre of tobacco allotment increased in value from $962 in 1954 to $1,673 in 1957 for Pittsylvania County and from $1,830 to $3,308 for Wilson, Greene, and Pitt Counties. The size of the values for an acre of tobacco allotment as well as the increase in values over the four-year period during which allotments were reduced under the program by 33 percent indicate that an appreciable proportion of the price·rais1ng benefits of the program have been capitalized into land values. / Master of Science

The continuous upward pressure of costs is forcing Virginia dairy farmers to adjust their operations in order to meet changing economic conditions, and to maintain acceptable income levels. The individual milk producer has little or no control over the price he receives for his product, whereas he does have considerable control over his costs of production. Efforts to reduce costs often offer the most practical method of improving net income levels. The objectives of this study were to identify those factors that are associated with variation in costs of producing a unit of milk output, and to estimate the individual effects of these variables on costs. Cost and other production data from 39 Grade A dairy farms for a five-year period, 1963-67, were obtained from the V.P.I. Farm Accounts System files. The average sample farm had 48 dairy cows, 2.5 full-time man equivalents of labor, $53,748 average investment, and 238 acres of crop and pasture land. The multiple regression procedure was used to determine the importance of each independent variable used in the study. Both linear and quadratic functions were used. The dependent variable was average total cost of producing a hundredweight of milk, and independent variables were those which were hypothesized to affect average total costs. Eight variables associated with variation in average costs of producing a hundredweight of milk were identified, and the effect of each on costs was estimated. / Master of Science

Master of Science

This paper has three chapters. In the first chapter, we develop a measure of housing sentiment for 24 cities in China by parsing through newspaper articles from 2006 to 2017.We find that the sentiment index has strong predictive power for future house prices even after controlling for past price changes and macroeconomic fundamentals. The index leads price movements by nearly 9 months, and it is highly correlated with other survey expectations measures that come with a significant time lag. In the second chapter, we show that short term house price movement is predictable by solely using newspaper and historical price change. In the last chapter, using the sentiment index constructed from newspaper, we got empirical results to show that some people are forward-looking when deciding default and a positive sentiment (anticipated house price appreciation) will lower the Z score of probability of default by 0.028. / Doctor of Philosophy / This paper has three chapters. In the first chapter, we develop a measure of housing sentiment for 24 cities in China by parsing through newspaper articles from 2006 to 2017. Two sentiment index were created using text mining method based on keywords matching and machine learning respectively.We find that the sentiment index has strong predictive power for future house prices even after controlling for past price changes and macroeconomic fundamentals. The index leads price movements by nearly 9 months, and it is highly correlated with other survey expectations measures that come with a significant time lag. In contrast, we find much weaker feedback coming from past prices to current sentiment. In the second chapter, we show that short term house price movement is predictable by solely using newspaper and historical price change. The accuracy of the prediction could be up to 0.96 for out of sample prediction. We first use a text mining method to transfer all the text information into numerical vector space, which is able to represent the extracted full information contained in a text. Then by adopting machine learning models of Neural networks, SVM, and random forest, we classified the newspaper into 1 (up) and 0 (down) group and constructed an index as the mean label accordingly. In the last chapter, by merging the Fannie Mae loan performance data with the sentiment index constructed from newspaper as well as the macro variables about local market, we got empirical results to show that some people are forward-looking when deciding default and a positive sentiment ( anticipated house price appreciation) will lower the Z score of probability of default by 0.028. We found that during the recession period, people access more information when they try to default, on top of the traditional econ conditions and historical house price, they also consider the future house price change. Moreover, borrowers with high income, high home value, and high FICO scores tend to pay more attention to future price change. However, for those who are less experienced in this game (first time home buyer), they only pay attention to the historical price change during the recession period.

Physicians often continue to prescribe brand-name drugs to their patients even when less expensive generic equivalents are available. In a 1994 study, Judith Hellerstein advances two hypotheses to explain this behavior. First, doctors may consciously conclude that certain brand-name drugs impart a relative therapeutic benefit that outweighs their higher cost. Second, physicians may choose to prescribe brand-name drugs without evidence of therapeutic superiority if neither they nor their insured patients bear the increased cost of these drugs. The second hypothesis implies that moral hazard is evident in physicians' prescribing behavior. Hellerstein's findings support neither hypothesis, but her estimation equation does not explicitly capture the effects of brand-name/generic price differentials and information diffusion on the probability of generic prescription. The author adapts Hellerstein's theoretical model to a modified estimation equation that incorporates these effects and uses it to create new estimates based on data on antimicrobial prescriptions from the 1994 National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS). Unexpectedly, the results appear to affirm both hypotheses. The evidence for moral hazard is particularly strong, as self-paying patients are significantly more likely than patients with Medicare or private insurance to be prescribed the generics that are cheapest relative to their brand-name counterparts. The author also finds that certain popular antimicrobial drugs such as amoxicillin and sulfamethoxazole/trimethoprim are prescribed in the same form (generic or brand-name) by most doctors to most patients. The market power exhibited by these preferred forms leads the author to conclude that they are "brands" in the economic sense. / Master of Arts