This dissertation consists of three essays in process improvement and assortment planning. In the first essay, we study firm's strategies on balancing two conflicting manufacturing process improvement activities: learning and process change. Learning deepens the firm's knowledge of the...

In this dissertation we study several key issues faced by firms while introducing new products to market. The first essay looks at product rollovers: introduction of a new product generation while phasing out the old one. We study the strategic decision of dual vs. single roll jointly with...

The traditional education system in Qing China has been widely debated over the past decades. Some have argued it was efficient and furthered economic growth, while others have stressed its inefficient nature, which led to the introduction of the modern education system in the closing decades of...

Taking the early U.S. automobile industry as an example, we evaluate four competing hypotheses on regional industry agglomeration: intra-industry local externalities, inter-industry local externalities, employee spinouts, and location fixed-effects. Our findings suggest that inter-industry...

This paper investigates the impact of royalty revision on incentives and profits in a two-stage (research and development (R&D) stage and marketing stage) alliance with a marketer and an innovator. The marketer offers royalty contracts to the innovator. We find that the potential for royalty...

In the era of knowledge economy, critical knowledge and technologies are key to enterprise competition. Huawei and ZTE are well known as top Chinese communication equipment suppliers. Both have paid great attention to intellectual property protection, and have applied a great amount of patents...

The relationship between the size of a market and the competitiveness of the market has been of long-standing interest to IO economists. Empirical studies have used the relationship between the size of the geographic market and both the number of firms in the market and the average sales of the...

Government policies that impose restrictions on the size of large establishments or firms, or promote small ones, are widespread across countries. In this paper, we develop a framework to systematically study policies of this class. We study a simple growth model with an endogenous size...