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Thesis advisor: Christopher Maxwell / Historically underpriced, tickets for shows and sports games are frequently purchased just for the intent of resale at a higher value. This action has helped facilitate the creation of a large online secondary market for event tickets. Trying to capture the excess demand left by primary sellers, online ticket brokers often drastically inflate prices from face value. Using data from Ace Ticket from the second half of the 2011 NFL season, this thesis examines what factors drive ticket price movement. By splitting the effects into a team strength component and a days until the contest component, this study finds two major factors correlated with changes in ticket prices. The results show that, while playoff chances are the best proxy for team strength, the days until the game element (in particular the last week before a contest) has the most significant effect on prices. Often dropping prices by over 50 percent, ticket brokers scramble to make a sale during the last week. Although individual NFL teams can aggressively price their tickets to capture more revenue immediately from the primary market, this analysis shows that they may not be able to compete with ticket brokers who can adjust prices daily without the fear of alienating fans / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics Honors Program. / Discipline: Economics.

Lam Yiu-ting. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-126). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.3 / Chapter 1.1 --- Literature review --- p.4 / Chapter 1.2 --- Summary of our results --- p.9 / Chapter 2 --- Intergroup externalities and market demand --- p.12 / Chapter 2.1 --- Introduction --- p.12 / Chapter 2.2 --- Results --- p.13 / Chapter 2.3 --- Proofs of Theorems 1 and 2 --- p.23 / Chapter 2.4 --- Conclusions --- p.31 / Chapter 2.5 --- Appendix --- p.32 / Chapter 2.5.1 --- Proofs for Paper 1 --- p.32 / Chapter 2.5.2 --- Graphs for Paper 1 --- p.47 / Chapter 3 --- Signalling goods and market demand --- p.51 / Chapter 3.1 --- Introduction --- p.51 / Chapter 3.2 --- Summary of Corneo and Jeanne (1997) --- p.53 / Chapter 3.3 --- Multiple signalling goods --- p.57 / Chapter 3.3.1 --- Our Model --- p.57 / Chapter 3.3.2 --- Constraints on the unobserved rank utility function --- p.63 / Chapter 3.3.3 --- Snobbish versus conformist --- p.68 / Chapter 3.3.4 --- Welfare implication --- p.80 / Chapter 3.4 --- Conclusions --- p.87 / Chapter 3.5 --- Appendix --- p.89 / Chapter 3.5.1 --- Proofs of our Lemmas --- p.89 / Chapter 3.5.2 --- "Proof of the derivation of SB, SA, R1 and R2" --- p.90 / Chapter 3.5.3 --- Examples about unobserved rank utility functions --- p.93 / Chapter 3.5.4 --- Proofs of Propositions 7 and 8 --- p.97 / Chapter 3.5.5 --- Illustration of Propositions 7 and 8 by examples --- p.98 / Chapter 3.5.6 --- Proof of Theorem 3 --- p.103 / Chapter 3.5.7 --- Details for own price effects --- p.104 / Chapter 3.5.8 --- Details for cross price effects --- p.114 / Chapter 4 --- Summary of the investigative research --- p.123

The focus of this thesis is the study of the demand side of the shadow economy. To achieve this, the informal consumption of Peruvian families located in urban areas is studied. This is possible thanks to a household survey collecting information on where people acquired their goods. The main contribution of the research is that it identifies an unexplored area in the literature with limited theoretical discussion and few empirical applications. Information about why people purchase from informal markets will supplement wider knowledge of labour allocation on informal opportunities. The thesis uses an Almost Ideal Demand System in order to verify some demand properties of informal consumption: income and price elasticities, the existence of linkages between working and purchasing decisions and explore the effects of bargaining on expenditure allocation. Four robust results are encountered. First, the inferiority of informal consumption is rejected. Formal and informal expenditure are classified as normal, but income responses on the latter (necessity) are lower than on the former (luxury). Second, there are linkage effects between working and purchasing in the informal and formal sectors. These effects are stronger for informal consumption and among the self-employed. Linkages are also not equally applicable across all goods. Better results are found within quasi-substitutes with leisure. Third, formal and informal food consumption reveals elastic demand curves and imperfect substitution between them, with higher compensated own-price and cross-price elasticities for formal markets. Fourth, household members bargain in their allocation decisions across markets, with females' decisions being closer to less-informal purchasing baskets. This result is clearer in the case of food consumption. Public policy recommendations based on these results are derived, where it is found that formalization policies will need to take into account their negative distributional effects.

Six hen's preferences between 5-min access to each of two litter substrates, sand and sawdust, were measured using dependent concurrent VI 60 s VI 60 s schedules of reinforcement. The obtained preferences were small and idiosyncratic. Demand functions were generated separately for each of the two substrates by requiring the hens to perform under increasing FR schedules. The demand functions were disorderly, some were linear, some were of mixed elasticity, and others curved upwards. No clear relation between the individual hens' preference and demand measures was found. The overall response rates, running response rates and average post-reinforcement pause durations were atypical compared to previous demand research, possibly due to low levels of reinforcer collection, but were similar for individual subjects in both demand conditions. During the demand assessment, dustbathing took place in a similar proportion of reinforcers for each substrate. During the preference assessment, a greater proportion of dustbathing took place during sand reinforcers. Individual hens did not consistently dustbathe more in their preferred substrate. It was argued that the inconclusive results were a product of the substrates used. The atypical demand functions, response rates and average PRP durations may have been due to behaviour that was not schedule related occurring during key time (i.e., the subjects may have been continuing a dustbathing bout). It is possible, that the two substrates were too similar, and thus the subjects did not have a clear preference for one over the other. In future research preference should be assessed prior to demand, to ensure a clear preference can be obtained, with reinforcers that are qualitatively more different than those used in the present experiment.

This dissertation is a collection of three economic studies on the demand for and optimal pricing of state lottery games. Lottery betting is a multi-billion dollar industry that provides an important source of government revenue. Since lotteries operate at such a large scale, suboptimal pricing could lead to substantial losses in potential profit. This body of work provides a significant contribution to the literature on lottery demand by introducing a number of innovative modeling techniques that resolve major shortcomings found in current methods and provide direct policy implications for improving the profitability of state lottery games. The first essay discusses and resolves three important issues widely overlooked in the literature on lottery demand: the treatment of observations with super-unitary expected values, controlling for the endogeneity of price, and the usefulness of estimating price elasticities evaluated at the sample mean. The second essay extends the effective price model of lottery demand into a setting where a single controller operates a portfolio of games simultaneously. Expenditure, own-, and cross-price elasticities for several on-line lottery games are estimated with a Barten synthetic demand system. These elasticities are used to obtain measures of price sensitivity, to determine the degree to which these games are either complements or substitutes, and to evaluate whether profits are maximized over the entire portfolio. Finally, the third essay describes a new method to analyze the profitability of different pricing schemes that explicitly accounts for the intertemporal nature of lottery games with rolling jackpots. Since period-by-period variation in sales induced by rolling jackpots causes changes in the probability that a jackpot is won, which in-turn influences the probability of reaching new drawings with higher jackpot amounts, static analysis of lottery profitability could lead to biased estimates of expected profit. By utilizing a Monte Carlo integration procedure, a measure of expected profit is obtained through the simulation of lottery play over a period of four years. Hypothetical policy changes are examined to estimate potential increases in profitability. Empirical results for the game, Lotto Texas, indicate that a $0.40 increase in price would lead to an estimated increase in profit ranging from $142 million to $191 million over four years.

A pneumatic droplet generator is described, which consists of a T-junction with a nozzle fit into one opening, the second opening is connected to a gas cylinder through a solenoid valve and the third connected to a length of steel tubing. The droplet generator is filled with liquid. Opening the valve for a preset time creates a pulse of alternating negative and positive pressure in the gas above the surface of the liquid. A jet of liquid issues far enough out of the nozzle that its tip becomes unstable, detaches and forms a droplet. Experiments were conducted using water/glycerin mixtures and molten metals including tin, zinc and zinc alloy. Droplet formation was photographed and the pressure variation inside the droplet generator recorded. The effect of various experimental parameters such as nozzle size, pressure pulse width, secondary gas flow pressure, liquid viscosity and temperature on droplet formation were investigated. An analytic model of incompressible liquid motion in the nozzle is used to explain the behavior of water/glycerin solutions inside the nozzle and droplet formation. The model demonstrates that the motion of the surface is out of phase with the exciting pressure oscillation. Experiments showed the oscillation of the liquid surface prior to droplet ejection and the time lag between the pressure oscillation and droplet ejection. The model predicts that maximum liquid velocity is attained at an intermediate value of viscosity, and experiments confirmed that the largest liquid motion was achieved with this intermediate value, which eventually leads to droplet formation. Similarly, with molten metals, a simple analytical method was used to estimate the diameter of droplets. The size of tin droplets measured from experiments was in good agreement with that obtained from the model.

A pneumatic droplet generator is described, which consists of a T-junction with a nozzle fit into one opening, the second opening is connected to a gas cylinder through a solenoid valve and the third connected to a length of steel tubing. The droplet generator is filled with liquid. Opening the valve for a preset time creates a pulse of alternating negative and positive pressure in the gas above the surface of the liquid. A jet of liquid issues far enough out of the nozzle that its tip becomes unstable, detaches and forms a droplet. Experiments were conducted using water/glycerin mixtures and molten metals including tin, zinc and zinc alloy. Droplet formation was photographed and the pressure variation inside the droplet generator recorded. The effect of various experimental parameters such as nozzle size, pressure pulse width, secondary gas flow pressure, liquid viscosity and temperature on droplet formation were investigated. An analytic model of incompressible liquid motion in the nozzle is used to explain the behavior of water/glycerin solutions inside the nozzle and droplet formation. The model demonstrates that the motion of the surface is out of phase with the exciting pressure oscillation. Experiments showed the oscillation of the liquid surface prior to droplet ejection and the time lag between the pressure oscillation and droplet ejection. The model predicts that maximum liquid velocity is attained at an intermediate value of viscosity, and experiments confirmed that the largest liquid motion was achieved with this intermediate value, which eventually leads to droplet formation. Similarly, with molten metals, a simple analytical method was used to estimate the diameter of droplets. The size of tin droplets measured from experiments was in good agreement with that obtained from the model.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of computer usage on the demand for paper and paperboard products. A log-linear model is developed to analyze the effect of computer usage on the demand for four categories of paper, newsprint, printing/writing paper, packaging paper and household/sanitary paper. The analysis is divided into two parts. The first part is US monthly analysis. We create computer number index as a measurement for computer usage. Monthly data (from Jan 1992 to Jun 2005) are collected to estimate the effect for four categories of paper. The monthly estimation results support the hypothesis that the increasing usage of computer has a significantly negative effect on the demand for printing/writing paper, and a significantly positive effect on the demand for packaging paper. But it doesn't provide enough evidence for the effect on the demand for newsprint. The second part is the yearly analysis on 16 main countries, which constitute the major demand for paper/paperboard products and are countries with widespread usage of computer. Using the yearly data from 1961 to 2002 and applying fixone model, we find that computer usage has a significantly positive effect on demand for packaging paper. The small difference in US monthly analysis and 16 countries yearly analysis may arise from the different measures in computer usage, prices of paper/paperboard products, and income.