Essays in industrial organization
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In Chapter 1, I study whether merchants impose surcharges for credit card transactions and how consumers respond after merchants have been allowed to impose surcharges. Before 2013, merchants were prohibited from imposing credit-card surcharges, but they were allowed to do so after a settlement between credit card companies and retailers and several court cases challenging state-level regulations. Using a consumer panel of shopping trips from 2013 to 2019, I construct a proxy for surcharges at the shopping trip level and examine how the distribution and mean value of the proxy change when merchants are allowed to impose surcharges. Due to noises in the underlying data, I am unable to provide evidence for or against an increase in the incidence of surcharges. Taking advantage of the settlement and court cases in four states afterward, I employ two research designs, a differences-in-differences design and a border design, to evaluate jointly whether merchants impose surcharges and whether consumers respond in the presence of surcharges. Overall, there are no large changes in the overall consumer usage of credit cards, but I find some evidence that consumers' usage of credit card has decreased for shopping trips with high spending. In Chapter 2, I study how the advertising of one product affects the sales of another product under the same brand name. Specifically, I examine how large the advertising spillover effect is using body wash and body lotion for a selected brand as a case study. Adopting a border strategy that takes advantage of the discontinuity in advertising across Designated Market Areas (DMA) borders and restricting the sample to border markets that only constitute a small part of the corresponding DMA, I find that the advertising spillover effect is positive but insignificant. I discuss possible reasons for the neutral results. In Chapter 3, I study the role of factors related to competition and market information in review manipulation. Using online reviews for restaurants in Santa Cruz County on Yelp, I examine how the number of negative filtered reviews that a restaurant receives per month varies with competition-related events (entry and exit, competitor experiencing a drop in rounded rating, and competitor receiving negative filtered review) and the degree that a restaurant may serve tourists using a panel data design. I find suggestive evidence that a restaurant may be more likely to receive negative fake reviews if it is more likely to serve tourists, experiences entries and exits of competitors, or its competitors receive a negative filtered review recently.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2022; ©2022 |
| Publication date | 2022; 2022 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Shiao, Wing Yan |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Einav, Liran |
| Thesis advisor | Einav, Liran |
| Thesis advisor | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Thesis advisor | Larsen, Bradley J |
| Degree committee member | Gentzkow, Matthew |
| Degree committee member | Larsen, Bradley J |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Economics |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Wing Yan Shiao. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Economics. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2022. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/ym186ct6799 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2022 by Wing Yan Shiao
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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