CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2012
| Author | Koltay, Gabor |
|---|---|
| Title | From Structural estimation to quasi experiment - Three essays in empirical industrial organization |
| Summary | The thesis consists of three studies in empirical industrial organization. The first chapter examines how consumers choose eco-labeled products. It argues that eco-labels transform ordinary products into impure public goods: next to the usual product characteristics they offer consumers the possibility to contribute to reduced environmental pollution. As such, eco-labeled products are policy experiments in the private provision of public goods. Accordingly, when estimating the effect of an eco-label the consumer choice model has to incorporate various explanations for the private provision of public goods: pure altruism, warm glow and conditional cooperation. It is shown that conditional cooperation implies a demand system with interdependent preferences that transforms the usual discrete choice model into a discrete game. This modified demand system is identified based on the assumption of no conspicuous consumption. The model is estimated for the German eco-label the "Blauer Engel" using a household panel sample of toilet paper purchases. The results show that conditional cooperation is important in explaining consumer choices, although the effect of the Blauer Engel label is close to zero on average. The second chapter contributes to the disaggregated evidence about asymmetric price transmission. It studies how station-level retail prices respond to wholesale price changes in the Hungarian gasoline market. The estimates show that although retail price changes are almost symmetric on average, there is a subset of stations that follow an asymmetric pricing strategy. Having a closer look at station characteristics reveals that asymmetric pricing is a brand property and that these brands have small market share (below 10%) and are not vertically integrated. Other observables, like the number or the types of competitors do not explain the asymmetric retail price response. These results imply that in the same local market there are firms that price symmetrically and firms that price asymmetrically. This finding does not support collusion and search based explanations of asymmetric price transmission, because these are based on market level interactions among firms and consumers. Instead, it points towards the role of adjustment costs as an explanation for asymmetric retail price responses. Moreover, the result that the number and the types of competitors does not explain asymmetric pricing lends additional support to the claim that pricing asymmetry does not necessarily imply collusive behavior. The third chapter applies difference-in-differences methods to identify the price effects of simultaneous mergers in the Hungarian retail gasoline market and to separate the different effects on the prices of the buyer and seller firms and on the prices of their respective competitors. The difference-in-differences approach exploits variation in the presence of merging firms across local markets to form different treatment-control group pairs in order to estimate separate effects for each type of firms affected by the mergers. This ex-post evaluation shows that both mergers resulted in a significant and positive but economically negligible price effect. Separating the simultaneous merger effects also reveals that the first merger affected only the prices of buyer firm's stations, the second had an effect on the prices of seller's stations and of its competitors. These results are not sensitive to the assumed dates when the mergers effectively change the firms' pricing policy. |
| Supervisor | Kézdi, Gábor; Stahl, Konrad |
| Department | Economics PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2012/cphkog01.pdf |
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