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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Essays on horizontal merger simulation: the curse of dimensionality, retail price discrimination, and supply channel stage-games

Pofahl, Geoffrey Michael 25 April 2007 (has links)
In the words of Joel I. Klein, former Assistant Attorney General of the United States, “[a]ntitrust enforcement in the merger area has never been as time-consuming, complex, or as central to the functioning of our economy as it is today” (Klein, 1998). As such, the development of transparent, efficient, and accurate merger analysis tools is an endeavor whose value continues to increase in the eyes of regulators and industry participants alike. Arguably, the most visible result of such endeavors is the emergence and advancement of a practice known as merger simulation. The first goal of this dissertation is to evaluate the merits of the Distance Metric (DM) demand model and its usefulness in merger simulations. Revered by its creators as easy-to-use, flexible, and able to handle large numbers of products, the DM approach has not received the “road-testing” necessary for establishing its practical usefulness. The DM model is used to estimate demand elasticities for 45 bottled-juice products. Elasticities are then used to simulate numerous hypothetical mergers. While adding validity to the alleged strengths of the DM approach, an additional contribution is made by demonstrating the robustness of merger simulation results across 22 DM specifications. Despite the oft-recognized reality of zone pricing by food retailers, this form of price discrimination has received little attention within the context of upstream merger analysis. Thus, the second objective of this dissertation is to relax the conventional merger simulation assumption of uniform pricing by retailers, allowing us to explore the impacts of zone pricing on post-merger price effects. Using the ready-to-eat cereals industry as a backdrop, it is shown that ignoring retail price discrimination veils a potentially diverse set of price effects that are otherwise lost in uniform pricing analyses. The goal of the final essay is to explore the implementation of more realistic supply channel interactions in merger simulations. In particular, a two-stage pricing game is used to conduct merger simulations in the refrigerated orange juice category. The overriding finding is that comparisons with conventionally used models will not be practical until the relationship between demand specification and two-stage game modeling is better understood.
2

Beers and Bonds : Essays in Structural Empirical Economics

Romahn, André January 2012 (has links)
This dissertation consists of four papers in structural empirics that can be broadly categorized into two areas. The first three papers revolve around the structural estimation of demand for differentiated products and several applications thereof (Berry (1994), Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995), Nevo (2000)), while the fourth paper examines the U.S. Treasury yield curve by estimating yields as linear functions of observable state variables (Ang and Piazzesi (2003), Ang et al. (2006)). The central focus of each paper are the underlying economics. Nevertheless, all papers share a common empirical approach. Be it prices of beers in Sweden or yields of U.S. Treasury bonds, it is assumed throughout that the economic variables of interest can be modeled by imposing specific parametric functional forms. The underlying structural parameters are then consistently estimated based on the variation in available data. Consistent estimation naturally hinges on the assumption that the assumed functional forms are correct. Another way of viewing this is that the imposed functions are flexible enough not to impose restrictive patterns on the data that ultimately lead to biased estimates of the structural parameters and thereby produce misleading conclusions regarding the underlying economics. In principle, the danger of misspecification could therefore be avoided by adopting sufficiently flexible functional forms. This, however, typically requires the estimation of a growing number of structural parameters that determine the underlying economic relationships. As an example, we can think of the estimation of differentiated product demand. The key object of interest here is the substitution patterns between the products. That is, we are interested in what happens to the demand of good X and all its rival products, as the price of good X increases. With N products in total, we could collect the product-specific changes in demand in a vector with N entries. It is also possible, however, that the price of any other good Y changes and thereby alters the demands for the remaining varieties. Thus, in total, we are interested in N2 price effects on product-specific demand. With few products, these effects could be estimated directly and the risk of functional misspecification could be excluded (Goolsbee and Petrin (2004)). With 100 products, however, we are required to estimate 10,000 parameters, which rarely, if ever, is feasible. This is the curse of dimensionality. Each estimation method employed in the four papers breaks this curse by imposing functions that depend on relatively few parameters and thereby tries to strike a balance between the necessity to rely on parsimonious structural frameworks and the risk of misspecification. This is a fundamental feature of empirical research in economics that makes it both interesting and challenging. / <p>Diss. Stockholm :  Stockholm School of Economics, 2012. Introduction together with 4 papers</p>
3

Transitions in new technology and market structure: applications and new methods for discrete choice model estimation

Wang, Shuang 06 November 2021 (has links)
My dissertation consists of three chapters that evaluate the social welfare effect of either antitrust policy or industrial transition, all using discrete choice model estimation as the front end for counterfactual analysis. In the first chapter, I investigate the economic impact of the merger that created the world's largest hotel chain, Marriott's acquisition of Starwood, thereby shedding light on the antitrust authorities' performance in protecting competitive markets for the benefit of consumers. Different from traditional merger analysis that focuses on the tradeoff between the upward pricing pressure and the cost synergy among the merging parties while fixing the market structure, I endogenize firms’ entry decisions into an oligopoly price competition model. To tackle the associated multiple equilibria issue, I use moment inequality estimation and propose a novel lower probability bound that reduces the computational burden from being exponential to being linear in the number of players. It also adds to the scant empirical evidence on post-merger cost synergy by showing that every one more affiliated hotel in the local market reduces a hotel's marginal cost by up to 2.3%. Then a comparison between the simulated with-merger and without-merger equilibria indicates that this merger enhances social welfare. In particular, for those markets that are previously not profitable for any firm to enter, because of the post-merger cost saving, Marriott or Starwood would enter 6% - 24% of them, which provides a new perspective for merger reviews. The second chapter, joint with Mingli Chen, Marc Rysman and Krzysztof Wozniak, studies the determinants of the US payment system's shift from paper payment instruments, namely cash and check, to digital instruments, such as debit cards and credit cards. With a 5-year transaction-level panel data, for the first time in the literature, we can distinguish the short-term effects of transaction size from the long-term changes in households’ preferences. To do so, we incorporate a household-product-quarter fixed effect into a multinomial logit model. We develop a new method based on the Minorization-Maximization (MM) algorithm to address the prohibitive computational challenge of estimating over one million fixed effects in such a nonlinear model. Results show that over a short horizon (within a quarter), the probability of using card increases with transaction sizes in general but exhibits substantial household heterogeneity. While over long horizon (five-year period of the data), with the estimated household-product-quarter fixed effects, we decompose the increase in card usage into different channels and find that only a third of it is due to the changes in household preferences. Another significant driver is the households' entry and exit into the sample. In the third chapter, my coauthors Jacob LaRiviere, Aadharsh Kannan, and I explore the "death of distance” hypothesis with a novel anonymized customer-level dataset on demand for cloud computing, accounting for both spatial and price competition among public cloud providers. We introduce a mixed logit demand model of spatial competition estimable with detailed data of a single firm but only aggregate sales data of a second. We leverage the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to tackle the customer-level missing data problem of the second firm. Estimation results and counterfactuals show that standard spatial competition economics hold even when distance for cloud latency is trivial.
4

Coalition Robustness of Multiagent Systems

Tran, Nghia Cong 26 May 2009 (has links) (PDF)
Many multiagent systems are environments where distinct decision-makers compete, explicitly or implicitly, for scarce resources. In these competitive environments, itcan be advantageous for agents to cooperate and form teams, or coalitions; this cooperation gives agents strategic advantage to compete for scarce resources. Multiagent systems thus can be characterized in terms of competition and cooperation. To evaluate the effectiveness of cooperation for particular coalitions, we derive measures based on comparing these different coalitions at their respective equilibria. However, relying on equilibrium results leads to the interesting question of stability. Control theory and cooperative game theory have limitations that make it hard to apply them to study our questions about stabililty and evaluate cooperation in competitive environments. In this thesis we will lay a foundation towards a theory of coalition stability and robustness for multiagent systems. We then apply this condition to form a methodology toevaluate cooperation for market structure analysis.
5

Demand Estimation, Relevant Market Definition And Identification Of Market Power In Turkish Beverage Industry

Kalkan, Ekrem 01 March 2010 (has links) (PDF)
This dissertation aims to contribute to the field of economics of competition policy by analyzing the demand structure and the market power in the Turkish beverage industry and in the cola market in particular. First, a demand system for the beverage products has been estimated by using a multi-stage linearized Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS). Using the own-price elasticity of cola in a SSNIP test (Small but Significant Non-Transitory Increase in Price), it is shown that cola market consists of a distinct relevant product market. Then, the demand elasticities of cola products at brand and package level have been estimated by the simple and nested logit models. Finally, the estimated demand elasticities of cola products have been used in measuring the degree of market power and predicting the effects of a hypothetical merger between Pepsi and Cola Turca by using a merger simulation technique. The results show that all cola suppliers have large price-cost margins for most of their products. Prices of the merging parties increase in average by 15 - 21% after the merger. The merger also causes the market price to increase by 16- 22% and consumer surplus to decrease by nearly 5% in average. Finally, depending on these results, the thesis recommends a stricter merger control criterion than dominance criterion for competition policy in Turkey.
6

A forecasting approach to estimating cartel damages : The importance of considering estimation uncertainty

Prohorenko, Didrik January 2020 (has links)
In this study, I consider the performance of simple forecast models frequently applied in counterfactual analysis when the information at hand is limited. Furthermore, I discuss the robustness of the standard t-test commonly used to statistically detect cartels. I empirically verify that the standard t-statistics encompasses parameter estimation uncertainty when one of the time series in a two-sided t-test has been estimated. Thereafter, I compare the results with those from a corrected t-test, recently proposed, where the uncertainty has been accounted for. The results from the study show that a simple OLS-model can be used to detect a cartel and to compute a counterfactual price when data is limited, at least as long as the price overcharge inflicted by the cartel members is relatively large. Yet, the level of accuracy may vary and at a point where the data used for estimating the model become relatively limited, the model predictions tend to be inaccurate.
7

There was change in Competitiveness Public and Private Banks in Local Markets Brazilians after the year 2000? A Competitive Analysis for the year 2010, considering all public banks (scenario # 1), and considering only CAIXA as the only Public Bank (scenario 2). Following, antitrust analysis in Sector Brazilian Banking: fusion simulation application from Bank of Brazil and CAIXA / Houve AlteraÃÃo na Competividade de Bancos PÃblicos e Privados em Mercados Locais Brasileiros apÃs o Ano de 2000? Uma AnÃlise Concorrencial para o ano de 2010, considerando todos os Bancos PÃblicos (cenÃrio n 1), e considerando apenas a CAIXA como o Ãnico Banco PÃblico (cenÃrio n 2). Na sequÃncia, anÃlise antitruste no Setor BancÃrio Brasileiro: AplicaÃÃo de simulaÃÃo de fusÃo entre Banco do Brasil e CAIXA

Rosendo Fernandes da Silva JÃnior 29 April 2014 (has links)
nÃo hà / Em 2008, o mundo se deparou com uma crise econÃmica que abalou as pilastras e confiabilidade no setor bancÃrio mundial. Os bancos se estruturam em um processo defensivo de proteÃÃo de seus ativos. No Brasil, O Governo Federal estimulou os bancos pÃblicos a prover crÃdito no mercado, buscado suavizar os efeitos de fuga de investimento e repatriaÃÃo de cash na recomposiÃÃo dos ativos. A pergunta chave desse artigo Ã: houve alteraÃÃo na Competitividade de Bancos PÃblicos e Privados em Mercados Locais Brasileiros apÃs o ano 2000? Mais de uma dÃcada se passou e refizemos essa verificaÃÃo para dados de 2010, seguindo Bresnahan e Reiss (1991a), e comparamos com o trabalho de Coelho, Pinho e Rezende (2011). Dada a alta concentraÃÃo no setor bancÃrio, como se comportaria uma simulaÃÃo de fusÃo entre os dois maiores bancos pÃblicos brasileiros? Esse trabalho se divide em 03 (trÃs) artigos. No artigo n 1, verificamos se houve mudanÃa na competitividade em bancos pÃblicos e privados para a dÃcada de 2010. Constatamos mudanÃas significativas, com alteraÃÃo da qualificaÃÃo do custo e do processo de estruturaÃÃo da margem preÃo-custo que nos faz inferir numa mudanÃa na composiÃÃo e de estratÃgias dos bancos pÃblicos e privados em uma nova visÃo competitiva do setor. Os bancos pÃblicos nÃo afetam o comportamento dos bancos privados em mercados locais, mas a exigÃncia de tamanho de mercado para a inserÃÃo de um novo concorrente foi reduzida pela alteraÃÃo da estrutura dos custos e influÃncias de efeitos regionais. E se considerÃssemos o mercado com apenas um banco pÃblico? No artigo n 2, refizemos a anÃlise, considerando a CAIXA como o Ãnico banco pÃblico, e encontramos resultados semelhantes a nossa anÃlise revisional de 2010, a notar mais Ãnfase nos efeitos regionais, tanto na reduÃÃo dos custos pra a regiÃo Norte como na alteraÃÃo negativa nos deslocadores de demanda para as regiÃes Sudeste, Sul e Centro-Oeste, bem como influÃncia praticamente nula do Ãnico banco pÃblico â CAIXA na reduÃÃo dos lucros dos bancos privados. No artigo n 3, apresentamos uma anÃlise de simulaÃÃo de fusÃo no setor bancÃrio brasileiro. O objetivo central foi capturar os efeitos da fusÃo entre o Banco do Brasil e a CAIXA em 12 (doze) segmentos/portifÃlios mais significativos do mercado. Os resultados do equilÃbrio pÃs-fusÃo foram obtidos pelo modelo PCAIDS (Proportionality-Calibrated Almost Ideal Demand System), proposto por Epstein e Rubinfeld (2002), que simula a fusÃo de 02 (duas) empresas em um mercado oligopolizado. Os Resultados do exercÃcio de simulaÃÃo confirmaram os aumentos esperados nos âpreÃosâ dos segmentos. Este resultado à condizente com a expectativa de que as fusÃes implicam em aumentos de preÃos de mercado e, sem ganhos de eficiÃncia econÃmica, podem impor perdas para os consumidores. / In 2008, the world faced an economic crisis that shook the pillars and reliability in the global banking sector. Banks are structured in a defensive process of its asset protection. In Brazil, the federal government encouraged public banks to provide credit in the market, sought to soften the investment leakage effects and cash repatriation in the restructuring of assets. The key question that is: was no change in Competitiveness Public and Private Banks in Local Brazilian markets after 2000? More than a decade has passed and redid this check to 2010 data, following Bresnahan and Reiss (1991a), and compared with Coelho's work, Pinho and Rezende (2011). Given the high concentration in the banking sector, would behave as a simulation of a merger between the two largest Brazilian public banks? This work is divided into 03 (three) articles. In Article 1, we check to see if there was a change in competitiveness in public and private banks for the decade to 2010. We found significant changes, by changing the qualification of the cost and price-cost margin of the structuring process that makes us infer a change in the composition and strategies of public and private banks in a new competitive view of the sector. Public banks will affect the behavior of private banks in local markets, but the market size requirement for the inclusion of a new competitor was reduced by changing the cost structure and influences of regional effects. And if we consider the market with only a public bank? In Article 2, redid the analysis, considering CAIXA as the only state-owned bank, and found similar results to our revisional analysis 2010, noted more emphasis on regional effects, both in reducing costs to the North as in the negative change in demand shifters for the Southeast, South and Midwest, and virtually no influence of the only public bank - CAIXA in reducing the profits of private banks. In Article 3, we present a fusion of simulation analysis in the Brazilian banking sector. The main objective was to capture the effects of the merger between Banco do Brazil and CAIXA in 12 (twelve) segments most significant portfolio in the market. The results of the post-merger balance were obtained by PCAIDS model (Proportionality-Calibrated Almost Ideal Demand System), proposed by Epstein and Rubinfeld (2002), which simulates the merger of 02 (two) companies in an oligopoly market. The results of the simulation exercise confirmed the expected increases in "price" of the segments. This result is consistent with the expectation that mergers entail market price increases and without economic efficiency gains, impose losses to consumers.

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