Empirical essays in industrial organization
In this dissertation, I present three empirical essays that encompass topics in industrial organization. The first essay examines the degree of competition and spatial differentiation in the retail industry by exploiting a unique dataset that describes a consumer's choice of store, product of purchase, item price, and demographics. I estimate a consumer's choice of retailer in the sales market for DVDs among online, mass merchant, electronics, video specialty, and music stores, and I allow for unobserved heterogeneity in preferences for store types and disutility of travel. A consumer's traveling cost varies by income, and substitution occurs proportionately more among stores of the same type. The second essay investigates an intriguing puzzle in the movie industry: "why do studios cluster their big theatrical hits during the July 4th weekend?" A series of recent papers by Einav (2002) indicate that although the underlying demand for theatrical movies remains high around Labor Day, studios tend to release their high quality movies at the beginning of the summer. I employ data from the home video industry to provide more evidence on whether booms in theatrical revenues are supply- or demand-driven and to investigate why firms might cluster their releases as they do.
Year of publication: |
2005
|
---|---|
Authors: | Chiou, Lesley C |
Other Persons: | Glenn Ellison. (contributor) |
Institutions: | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics. (contributor) |
Publisher: |
Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Saved in:
freely available
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