| dc.description.abstract | In 1998, “Two Trillion, Two Stars” plan was devised by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and the TFT LCD was one of the key industries included in the plan. Up to now, the LCD monitor was proposed to the market for five years. With the breakthrough of technology, the LCD monitor is gradually accepted by the consumers. As a result of the rapid change of technology and the market demand, many kinds of LCD monitors may be proposed in a short time. Therefore, the LCD monitors proposed in the same period have different characteristics. For this reason, we collected data on the issue of every month from January 2001 to August 2006, and our source of data is PC Shopper. We apply hedonic price model and semiparametric model to analyze the effects of the LCD monitor characteristics to the price, and also examine whether firms charge the differential price for their LCD monitors.
In this paper, we compare the empirical results of two models. Because the technological improvements vary frequently in the PC market, the use of parametric model to estimate the effect of the characteristics to the price isn’t appropriate. And the results of semiparametric model show nonlinearities in the pricing of LCD monitor characteristics over time. Furthermore, we find that foreign firms have advanced technology to charge higher price for their monitors in the early period. In recent years, foreign firms aren’t able to charge differential price for their products since domestic firms make progress in their technology. The results also show that competition nowadays is strong in the LCD monitor market. | en_US |