This study presents three essays on the evolving competitive environment characterizing the modern retailing industry: (1) the impact of the scope of supermarket services on food prices and demand; (2) the impact of Wal-Mart on retail wages and workers; and (3) the expansion strategy of...

This study uses an export base model to examine the relative importance of new and existing manufacturing establishments in stimulating employment growth in the rest of the economy. The disaggregation of the manufacturing sector into new and existing establishments extends previous export base...

Why do some workers who apparently perform similar tasks and exercise similar job skills get paid very different wages? And, why do firms have the boundaries we observe; in particular, why do firms using closely related production technologies and serving closely related markets specialize...

Winemaking firms in California and southern France are organized quite differently. In this dissertation, I describe and analyze the economic changes and the structure of capabilities that make vinification cooperatives appropriate in southern France but not in California. I apply recent...

This dissertation, consisting of four independent but complementary research papers, examines buying behavior of consumers in retail channels, efficiency characteristics of the Internet market, and pricing strategies of Internet retailers. This investigation involves both theoretical and...

In the first part of this thesis, we consider a manufacturer who has a process with an increasing failure rate over time. In order to improve the performance of the process, the following two types of maintenance activities are outsourced to an external contractor: (a) Preventive maintenance...

This research offers an empirical analysis of the economic effects on Morocco from implementing a Free Trade Area (FTA) with the European Union (EU) signed in 1996. Since the FTA translates largely into unilateral discriminatory tariff elimination against EU imports, there are concerns about the...

This study examines the accuracy of various time series models in forecasting daily levels of occupancy. A reservation data set of 3 hotels that include over 3450 booking curves is used to test the performance of five models in forecasting occupancy levels up to 99 days in advance. Three...

The first essay examines the phenomenon of free riding and underinvestment in noncooperative entry deterrence in the Gilbert and Vives (1986) model with differentiated products. Our analysis proves that when both entry allowing and entry deterring equilibria coexist, underinvestment can occur in...

We model divisionalization as a two-stage simultaneous move duopoly game. In stage one, firms simultaneously establish divisions. In stage two, all divisions play a Cournot game. The major contribution of this thesis is to generalize the analysis of strategic firm structure in simultaneous move...