Thesis advisor: Hideo Konishi / This dissertation covers three essays in modelling the market competitions with the presence of consumer search. The first two essays add on Wolinsky's (1986) model to investigate firms' optimal choice of their way of doing business in response to the changing consumer search behaviors during the information age. The third essay modifies the Varian's (1980) model to provide a new mechanism to rationalize the countercyclical markups in supermarkets. The first essay concerns the formation of referral alliance. It extends the Wolinsky's (1986) model to a three-stage game with two types of products produced by a continuum of firms with each one having strength in a single type only. In the first stage, firms simultaneously decide on the formation of referral alliances, in which each alliance consists of a pair of firms producing different types of products. In the second stage, they set price simultaneously. In the third stage, each consumer who only values one type of product searches sequentially for the right product. We show that firms with low ability to deal with the unmatched consumers are positively assorted together in the formation of referral alliance with multiple equilibrium possible. The proliferation of referral alliance always benefits consumers but not necessarily firms. One the one hand, it intensifies competition and drives down the market price. On the other hand, it increases the mass of consumers participating in the search market. The price elasticity of demand together with our stability condition govern the changes in consumer and social welfare as the search cost varies. The reduction in search cost always increases consumer and social welfare only if the equilibrium is stable with elastic demand. The policy implication from our results is that it might be more effective to improve consumer and social welfare by inducing more firms to participate in the referral alliances rather than reducing the consumers' search cost. The second essay studies the incentives for stores to invest effort in serving customers if effort is costly and might be merely persuasive that reduces consumption utility. We incorporate a sales agent to each store in Wolinsky's (1986) model, in which the sales agent is paid either by fixed wage or by commissions. The commissions motivate sales agents to provide more advice, which could be indeed useful to increase clients' willingness to pay or merely persuasive without affecting it. Consumers are sophisticated that understand the dual roles of effort before visiting firms, but they might be impressionable and therefore could not stay away from the effect of persuasion when they are making the purchasing decision. When consumers are heterogeneous in terms of their impressionability, they are sorted into stores with fixed wage and commissions in the equilibrium. The composition of stores varies with the search cost and the ability of sales agents to increase consumers' willingness to pay (effectiveness of advice). When the advice is relatively ineffective, there will be an increase in mass of fixed wage stores in response to a reduction in search cost. The reverse is true when the advice is sufficiently effective. Additionally, the mass of fixed wage stores always increases as the advice becomes less effective. The competitive equilibrium outcome might imply that there are too little commission-based stores, so it could be social welfare enhancing by encouraging more consumers to visit the stores with commissions. The third essay provides a simple mechanism that rationalizes the countercyclical markups in supermarkets with the presence of a warehouse club. We first provide a mechanism on the higher supermarket prices upon the entry of the warehouse club. The new warehouse club attracts price-sensitive consumers away from supermarkets, which reduces the price elasticity of the consumers in the supermarket regime. This relaxes price competition resulting in higher supermarket prices. After that we apply the same mechanism to explain the countercyclical markups in supermarkets. During economic booms, the time value of consumers increases making them less willing to visit the warehouse club. Thus, economic booms increase the amount of price-sensitive consumers in supermarkets, intensifying price competition and inducing a lower price relative to cost in booming times. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

Purchasing products from online e-stores is getting popular with the advance of Internet infrastructure and network security. At current stage, most e-stores resemble vending machines rather than real stores because they lack clerks to persuade prospects into buying products and to bargain with the customers for making a good deal. This research aims to design an easy-to-use and autonomous sales-agent, called Isa, to act as a virtual clerk in an e-store. A new approach is proposed to enable the agent to dynamically adopt different persuasion and negotiation strategies according to different characteristics of human buyers. Additionally, this approach enables a sales-agent to learn the best strategies without seller¡¦s instructions. Both laboratory and field experiments are conducted to assess Isa¡¦s performance. The experimental results reveal that Isa can improve a seller¡¦s surplus and increase a buyer¡¦s product evaluation, willingness to pay more money for the product, and satisfaction with visiting the s-store.

La force de vente est un système humain, et de relations humaines complexes qui se distingue par une activité de gestion spécifique fondée sur le contrôle et la supervision directe des vendeurs dans leurs activités quotidiennes. Pour décrypter ces relations entre les acteurs, nous avons mobilisé le concept de socialisation organisationnelle, à la fois parce qu’il propose une lecture nouvelle de la réalité managériale, mais aussi parce qu’il constitue un modèle d’influence à même de réguler les comportements organisationnels des acteurs. Cette thèse a pour objectif d’éclairer le management des vendeurs indépendants en situation d’intégration, et d’expliquer pourquoi le turnover de ces vendeurs est aussi élevé au cours de cette phase cruciale du processus de socialisation. L’exploitation du potentiel théorique du concept de socialisation pose néanmoins la question de la pertinence d’une telle étude, étant donné que les vendeurs indépendants peuvent se soustraire à toute forme de socialisation, parce qu’ils n’appartiennent pas juridiquement à l’entreprise. Pour cela, nous menons une première étude qui permet de mettre en évidence le caractère aléatoire et naturel de la socialisation dans ces organisations, à travers les interactions. Nous proposons donc de conceptualiser la socialisation du vendeur indépendant, et la considérons comme un processus de construction de la relation managériale. Le modèle d’analyse que nous développons articule le cadre d’analyse interactionniste de la socialisation à travers le processus de construction de sens, la théorie de la régulation sociale, et la théorie du contrat psychologique. Il est testé sur le terrain, à travers une étude qualitative, mobilisant la méthode des cartes cognitives. En s’appuyant sur les représentations mentales des principaux acteurs de la socialisation du vendeur indépendant, nous souhaitons produire des connaissances qui tiennent compte des réalités et des contextes dans lesquels ces forces de vente exercent. Les résultats de notre recherche mettent en évidence la complexité des schèmes étudiés. Ceux-ci révèlent la difficulté à faire converger les intérêts des acteurs dans leur collaboration. Ils révèlent aussi l’existence d’une socialisation partielle due, en partie, au fait que les entreprises évoluent difficilement dans leurs pratiques de gestion ; les connaissances acquises par les nouveaux vendeurs portent essentiellement sur les aspects commerciaux du travail ; les relations entre membres de la force de vente ne sont pas prises en compte dans le processus de socialisation. Finalement, les vendeurs partent parce que les composantes de leurs relations avec l’entreprise ne correspondent pas à leur système de valeurs. Dans ce cas, nous proposons de gérer et de formaliser la socialisation du vendeur indépendant, en prônant un management et un leadership partagé qui permettrait de prendre en compte les intérêts des différents acteurs. / Sales force is a human and complex human relations system that is characterized by a specific management activity based on the control and the direct supervision of the sales agents in their daily activities. In order to decrypt these relations between the actors, we have mobilized the concept of organizational socialization, both because it proposes a further reading of the managerial reality, but also because it constitutes a model of influence able to regulate the organizational behaviors of the actors. This thesis aims at enlightening the management of the independent sales agents into labor integration process, and explaining why the turnover of the sales agents is so high during that critical stage of socialization process. The exploiting of the theoretical potential of the concept of socialization nevertheless arises the issue of the relevance of such a study, given the independent sales agents can avoid any kind of socialization, because legally they don’t belong to the company. For that we make a first survey that enables us to point out the random and natural character of the socialization in these organizations through interactions. We propose thus to conceptualize the socialization of the independent salesman, and we consider it as a construction process of the management relation. The analysis model that we develop uses the interactionnist analysis framework of the socialization through the process of building a sense, the theory of the social regulation, and the theory of psychological contract. It has been field-tested through a qualitative research study, mobilizing the method of cognitive cards. On the basis of the mental representations of the main actors of the independent sales agents ‘socialization, we wish to produce skills that take into account realities and the environments in which these sales teams work. The results of our research show clearly the complexity of the schemes studied. These reveal the difficulty of converging the actors ‘interests in their collaboration. They reveal also the existence of a partial socialization due, partly, to the fact that the companies poorly evolve in their management practices. The skills acquired by the new sales agents are based essentially on the commercial aspects of work. The relations between the sales workforces are not taken into account in the socialization process. Finally, the sales agents leave work because the components of their relations with the company do not match with their value system. In that case, we propose to manage and formalize the socialization of the independent sales agent, recommending shared management and leadership that would permit to take into account the interests of the different actors.

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