UNDERSTANDING FIRMS’ STRATEGIC BEHAVIORS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS
| dc.contributor.author | Zhang, Haimeng | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Barwick, Panle | |
| dc.contributor.chair | Waldman, Michael | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Stoye, Joerg | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Brancaccio, Giulia | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Jungbauer, Thomas | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-10-31T16:21:19Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-10-31T16:21:19Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-08 | |
| dc.description | 156 pages | |
| dc.description.abstract | Firms are key participants in the market. Compared to individual consumers, firms, particularly those with significant market power, are often seen by economists as more resourceful to overcome information frictions, more likely to retain past information and less susceptible to bounded rationality. As a result, firms are capable of acting as sophisticated strategic players. Under the assumption of being driven by a clearly defined profit motive, firms may behave strategically when interacting with other market participants, including consumers, other firms and governments. Understanding firms’ strategic behaviors is a critical step in assessing market efficiency, analyzing the wellbeing of consumers, and designing or evaluating government policies. This dissertation consists of three essays that analyze firms’ strategic behaviors in different settings. Chapter 1 studies firms' strategic interactions in government organized spectrum auctions. In these ascending-bid auctions, firms as bidders are able to communicate their private information with one another using jump bidding as signals. The signals are credible since bidders with lower private information incur a higher ex ante cost for choosing a jump bid with any given size. This prevents the bidders with lower private information from mimicking those with higher private information. In equilibrium, the signaling model predicts lower expected revenue to the seller, in this case the government, than in the "open exit" model in which jump bidding is not allowed. Using data from a spectrum auction held by the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, the mean valuation estimated using the signaling model is higher compared to that of the open exit model. This implies that if bidders are indeed using jump bids as signals, ignoring it leads to estimates of the mean values that are biased downwards. This result is consistent with the prediction of the theoretical model that bidders pay lower prices with jump bidding than in an open exit auction. I estimate that if jump bidding was prohibited, the government could have had 8% higher revenues from the auction. In Chapter 2, my coauthors and I evaluate a government policy that subsidizes the agricultural equipment rental markets in India. We observe that private rental firms favor farmers located in dense areas and demanding higher machine-hours because equipment needs to be moved in space. Using our own census of 40,000 farmers, we document that costly delays and price dispersion in rentals are ubiquitous, and that small-scale farmers are rationed out by private rental firms. This rationing could be detrimental to aggregate productivity if small farmers have the highest marginal return to capital. A government subsidized first-come-first-served dispatch system grants small-scale farmers timely access to equipment at the expense of travel time. In a calibrated model of frictional rental services, optimal queueing and service dispatch we show that, while the constrained efficient allocation prioritizes large-holder farmers, small-scale farmers in dense areas are valuable because they help maximize capacity utilization. Through counterfactuals, we show that when the induced increase in subsidized equipment supply is high enough, service finding rates for small-farmers increase relative to large-holders farmers even when providers prioritize large-scale. In Chapter 3, I offer an alternative explanation to the existing theories on why firms make the strategic decision to carry out planned obsolescence. Planned obsolescence refers to the practice of firms choosing durability levels for their products below the cost-efficient ones. Motivated by the Phoebus cartel, whose reason for engaging in planned obsolescence cannot be explained by existing theories, I introduce a new theory that centers on an important concept from behavioral economics: present-biased preferences. I construct a theoretical model which demonstrates that when consumers are present biased, that is, when they exhibit time-inconsistent preference in favor of immediate gratification, a monopolist chooses a profit-maximizing level of durability below that chosen by a perfectly competitive market with the same production technology. | |
| dc.identifier.doi | https://doi.org/10.7298/t13y-aa77 | |
| dc.identifier.other | Zhang_cornellgrad_0058F_13274 | |
| dc.identifier.other | http://dissertations.umi.com/cornellgrad:13274 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/112104 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | Auction | |
| dc.subject | Industrial organization | |
| dc.subject | Planned obsolescence | |
| dc.subject | Rental equipment market | |
| dc.subject | Signaling | |
| dc.subject | Structural estimation | |
| dc.title | UNDERSTANDING FIRMS’ STRATEGIC BEHAVIORS AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS | |
| dc.type | dissertation or thesis | |
| dcterms.license | https://hdl.handle.net/1813/59810.2 | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Economics | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | Cornell University | |
| thesis.degree.level | Doctor of Philosophy | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph. D., Economics |
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