1,721,026 research outputs found
Essays on consumer behaviour and pricing
Full text linkThis dissertation is a collection of five essays examining different aspects of consumer and firm behavior in dynamic markets. The first essay combines clickstreams of users at a major news website with Facebook activity data, to study if social networks complement or compete for online browsing time. This is the first empirical study to show that Facebook activity increases time spent on news sites. Online news consumption is a shared experience, as the activity of social network friends strongly influences the behavior of other network members. We also find that visitors’ own browsing patterns are important predictors of online content consumption. The second essay examines consumer attitudes to risk and uncertainty vis-a-vis their purchase and search decisions for air tickets online. Using a two-stage model of purchase incidence and carrier choice, we find that browsing experience, search costs and product characteristics are important predictors of purchase incidence. Implications for website managers are also discussed. The third essay provides insights on the impact of customer heterogeneity and preference stochasticity on behavior based price discrimination. While customer heterogeneity intensifies competition, resulting in greater price discrimination, preference stochasticity reduces the incidence of price discrimination. Overall, the effect of preference stochasticity is more salient. The fourth essay presents models of strategic interaction to analyze the impact of dominance and concentration on pricing strategies. We show that lack of market dominance is a sufficient condition for discounts to existing customers. We further test our predictions via an experiment with pricing professionals. The behavior of professionals confirms that price discrimination increases with market dominance and concentration; however, lack of dominance is not a sufficient condition for loyalty discounts. We contend that increasing competition is a more effective means of improving consumer welfare compared to regulating dominant firms. The fifth essay considers the role of identity and customer type recognition in influencing pricing behavior in dynamic markets with symmetric and asymmetric players. When customer identity is detectable firms charge higher prices to repeat customers while new customers are offered lower prices. However, pricing behavior changes when information on customer type is available and this behavior varies with market structure. Age, education and experience of managers are also found to significantly influence pricing behavior
Design of online reputation systems: an economic perspective
Full text linkOnline reputation systems are certainly the most overlooked 'heroes' of today's social Web. While these mechanisms are a vital element of every online transaction, they have received less consideration than some of their more well-known cousins, such as recommender systems or social networks, whose success would often not have been possible and tenable without their discrete but active backing. It then follows that despite their value and importance, the implementation of current reputation mechanisms has mostly been the result of trial-and-error. Resting on an economic perspective, this thesis regroups three chapters whose frameworks and findings aim at helping mechanism designers and researchers understand key mechanisms at play and develop more efficient online reputation systems. The first chapter examines the optimal number of ratings a reputation mechanism must make publicly available within an online marketplace in order to minimize cheating and maximize Pareto efficiency. I develop a moral hazard stage game featuring fictitious players which has the compelling property to prevent reputation effects from disappearing in the long run. I show that the number of ratings displayed by a reputation system is a fundamental predictor of market efficiency, and that the latter number should be kept minimal in order to maximize social welfare in the market – especially for economies proposing interactions with a high profit margin. The second chapter studies how different classes of reporting behaviours commonly found online affect the reliability of a reputation mechanism. I develop an iterative stochastic approximation model which I use to construct a behavioural measure of efficiency, so-called 'reporting bias'. I demonstrate that reporting bias tends towards its maximum when raters comply with the reports left by their predecessors. Following this result, I recommend to keep the rating interface separated from the rest of the reputation system. I also find that fake ratings are particularly harmful when one type of behaviour is present in the economy and suggest to counterbalance sybil attacks by displaying pairs of contrasted ratings. Finally, I defend the use of the arithmetic mean against the median as a way to compute reputation scores. The third chapter analyses how 5-star rating scales can lead to the formation of bimodal distributions of ratings within online marketplaces. Using a 2-time period model featuring altruistic raters, I identify the existence of a 'blind spot' of unrated transactions whose magnitude increases in the cost of rating and decreases in the number of buyers inhabiting the economy. Developing an additional model featuring Bayesian agents suffering from confirmatory bias, I show that non-binary rating scales can leave space to ambiguity and possibly wrong posteriors, even in the long run. Overall, results of the chapter hint that fine-grained rating scales best suit signalling reputation systems while coarse-grained scales should be preferred for sanctioning mechanisms
The Economics of E-Commerce: A Strategic Guide to Understanding and Designing the Online Marketplace
No full textDespite the recent misfortunes of many dotcoms, e-commerce will have major and lasting effects on economic activity. But the rise and fall in the valuations of the first wave of e-commerce companies show that vague promises of distant profits are insufficient. Only business models based on sound economic propositions will survive. This book provides professionals, investors, and MBA students the tools they need to evaluate the wide range of actual and potential e-commerce businesses at the microeconomic level. It demonstrates how these tools can be used to assess a variety of existing applications.
Advances in web-based technology--particularly automation and delegation technologies such as smart agents, shopping bots, and bidding elves--support the further growth of e-commerce. In addition to enabling consumers to conduct automated comparisons and sellers to access visitors' background information in real time, such software programs can make decisions for individuals, negotiate with other programs, and participate in online markets. Much of e-commerce's economic value arises from this kind of automation, which not only reduces operating costs but adds value by generating new market interactions.
This text teaches how to analyze the added value of such applications, considering consumer behavior, pricing strategies, incentives, and other critical factors. It discusses added value in several e-commerce arenas: online shopping, business-to-business e-commerce, application design, online negotiation (one-to-one trading), online auctions (one-to-many trading), and many-to-many electronic exchanges. Combining insights from several years of microeconomic research as well as from game theory and computer science, it stresses the importance of economic engineering in application design as well as the need for business models to take into account the "total game.
Uncertainty, information acquisition and economic equilibria
Full text linkChapter one introduces the thesis, and the relationships between the different chapters. The second chapter presents a model of macroeconomic co-ordination failures based on local interaction where firms have some market power. The economy exhibits a multiplicity of Pareto-ranked equilibria. We show that the introduction of uncertainty about the competitive advantage of firms generates an endogenous equilibrium selection process. This suggests a possible solution for the multiplicity problem in macroeconomic models ofco-ordination. The third chapter introduces the notion of limited attention to economic modelling. Games are drawn from a large set, and players choose how much information about the game they wish to gather. In addition we assume that more information is expensive. Information can either be acquired secretly or publicly. We solve the model for both cases and identify the conditions under which the outcomes of the two models differ. Chapter four is an application of the ideas studied in the third chapter. Here, we consider the problem of firms having to decide whether to enter a new market or not. Before they take that decision, they have the opportunity to buy information about several variables that might affect the profitability of this market. Our model differs from the existing literature on endogenous information acquisition in two respects: (1) there is uncertainty about more than one variable, and (2) information is acquired secretly. When the cost of acquiring information is small, entry decisions will be made as if there was perfect information. Equilibria where each firm acquires only a small amount of information are more robust than the socially undesirable equilibria where all firms gather all information. Examples illustrate the importance of assumptions (1) and (2). The last chapter is somewhat different from the previous ones. In the 1950s and 1960s probability learning experiments showed that people adopt probability matching strategies in repeated choice situations, rather than strategies that maximise expected utility. These findings were compatible with the predictions of stochastic learning theories like Estes' and Bush and Mosteller's. As economists' interest in experiments and learning theories grows, these findings are of relevance today. We survey the known results and assess their relationship with different theories. We look at the many results gathered for the special case of a repeated, binary choice decision experiments. We show it is unlikely that probability matching can serve as the sole prediction of asymptotic behaviour, but that any theory of behaviour in repeated decision situations should include it in its predictions
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Dynamic Matching and Bargaining: The Role of Private Deadlines
No full textThis paper replaces and joins two earlier papers by the same authors, namely “Dynamic Matching and Bargaining: The Role of Private Deadlines” and “Dynamic Matching and Bargaining with Heterogeneous Deadlines”© 2014, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. This paper analyzes bargaining outcomes when agents do not have stationary time preferences (as represented by a constant discount factor) but are pressed by firm deadlines. We consider a dynamic model where traders with heterogeneous deadlines are matched randomly into pairs who then bargain about the division of a fixed surplus. A trader leaves the market when an agreement has been reached or when his deadline expires. Our analysis encompasses both the case of perfect and imperfect information about the partner’s deadline. We define, characterize and show the existence of a stationary equilibrium configuration. We characterize when delay occurs and when deadlines are missed in equilibrium and show that the payoffs of traders are strictly increasing and concave in own deadline, unless bargaining takes place under imperfect information and no delay occurs, in which case all pairs immediately agree on an almost even split. We provide comparative statics exercises and illustrate our results by some examples.Hurkens gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, through grant ECO2012-37065, from AGAUR through grant 2014SGR510 and through the Severo Ochoa Programme for Centres of Excellence in R&D (SEV-2011-0075)Peer Reviewe
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