dc.description.abstract | This dissertation consists of three essays on the industrial economics each entitled
"Market Competition and the Internal Structure of Firms",
"A Simple Theory of the Seller′s Listing Strategy in Online Auctions", and
"Late Bidding in the Pay-per-Bid Auction".
The first essay investigates how the firm adjusts its internal structure and alters its incentive contracts in response to the market environment.
Specifically, it is concerned with the firm′s optimal hierarchical structure and the corresponding incentive contracts for the managers as a function of variables which are related to the degree of market competition,
when the middle manager′s sole function is information-gathering.
Consistent with recent empirical literature, I show that under one measure of market competitiveness, an increase in its value leads the firm to flatten its hierarchy and offer stronger incentives to its agents.
However, under another measure, the reverse is true.
This essay therefore not only offers a theoretical rationale for some of the recent empirical findings regarding the relation between market competition and internal structure of firms,
but also provides theoretical qualifications for these findings.
The second essay proposes a unified framework to characterize the sellers′ optimal listing strategy in the online auction as a function of their rates of time-impatience.
Specifically, the fixed-price listing, the pure auction, and the buy-it-now auction are each a solution of the seller′s single optimization problem under different values of the rate of time-impatience: the perfectly patient seller adopts the pure auction; the sellers with medium range of time-impatience adopt the buy-it-now auction; and the most impatient sellers adopt the fixed-price listing.
It is also shown that the optimal posted price for the fixed-price listing is greater than the optimal reserve price for the buy-it-now auction, which in turn is greater than that of the pure auction.
This implies that the optimal reserve price is inversely related to the seller′s degree of time-patience.
The final essay relates to an emerging type of online auction known as pay-per-bid auction.
The purpose of this section is to construct a simple theoretical model to investigate the bidders′ late bidding behaviour in the pay-per-bid auctions.
We extend Augenblick (2012)′s model to incorporate late bidding stage in which the bids have a positive probability of being lost and that bidders have no time to react to the price change.
Using symmetric Markov perfect equilibrium as our solution concept,
we show that late bidding can be the equilibrium strategy.
Moreover, late bidding is more likely to occur if the current price is lower, the bidding fee is cheaper and the number of bidders are fewer.
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