Download or read book Three Essays in Quantitative Marketing written by Ka-Kit Tse and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays in Quantitative Marketing Models written by Tarek Ben Rhouma and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 14 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays in Quantitative Marketing written by Xavi Vidal-Berastain and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation consists of three essays structured in three chapters. Chapter one studies the effect of social media has on consumer decisions. It is well-known that social media has become a major pillar of most brand strategies. We investigate the impact of social media posts on brand choices as well as how social media posts are generated in the context of political candidates (brands). We center our study at the early stages of the 2012 Republican Presidential primary race. This time period is sometimes referred to as the pre-race and collect daily positive, negative, and neutral posts on social media primary race as well as daily polls, news coverage, and candidate debate performance. We construct a model with consumers taking myopic decisions based a preference relation that is correlated across time. In doing so, we shed light on the underlying mechanisms linking the strategic generation of word of mouth media to voting decisions. Our results show that the tone of the social media around brands or candidates are relevant measures to account for. Specifically, for influencing voters' decisions, increasing the level of positive word of mouth around a candidate is more effective than a similar increase in the level of exposure in the mass media. We also show that the positive social media posts decrease more slowly than negative as the candidate's poll rank worsens. Finally, our results of the multiplicative attention model reveal important differences in the speed at which the general level of social media attention is translated into positive and negative social media. Chapters two and three switch gears to join the wave of big data that is rapidly expanding the set of questions that can be approached. Chapter two of this dissertation uses a very large panel of consumers to disentangle how consumers change the way they shop as more options become available. Grocery retailing has witnessed almost continuous disruption over the past several decades. While the traditional supermarket format was an important post-war innovation, it has gradually been refined and replaced by a diverse collection of sophisticated retail platforms, including super-centers, club stores, limited assortment stores, organic specialists, and a small, but growing online channel. Consumers now face a rich array of shopping options that differ by size, location, assortment, and price, alongside other less quantifiable dimensions such as ambiance and convenience. We exploit machine learning and data fusion techniques to create and combine a rich collection of data on consumer choice and store entry decisions into a unified longitudinal panel. We further employ frontier synthetic control methods (Abadie et al. (2010)) to address the issues of selection and heterogeneous response inherent to this context, extending them to our dis-aggregated setting. Grocery retailing is surprisingly complicated, as it involves what is essentially an exercise in joint production between consumer and retailer that takes place over a sophisticated two-sided platform linking consumer product manufacturers (brands) to their downstream shopping base. The last chapter of this dissertation augments chapter two. Specifically, it presents a parallelization strategy that exploits recent improvements in general purpose GPU-computing to improve the performance of the synthetic controls estimator when applied to large and un-balanced data sets. When implemented on unbalanced panels, the synthetic controls estimator suffers from interpolation bias, over-fitting and does not have statistical properties that eases the task of performing causal hypothesis testing. Traditional fixes to these problems such as parameter-regularization (for over-fitting) or permutation tests (inference), helps to mitigate these problems but increase the computational cost exponentially. Chapter shows how to frame the quadratic programming program as a tensor optimizing problem. A tensor is a generalization of a matrix to allow for an arbitrary number of dimensions. We create a tensor containing all the data to optimize and to perform permutation tests and side-loaded into a GPU and run on a modified version of the mirror descent algorithm to perform thousands of optimization problems in parallel. I show the performance of my method and illustrate its power by studying how the entry of different retail platforms changes the way consumers purchase organic product"--Pages ix-xi.
Download or read book The Value of Information written by Ramanan Laxminarayan and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book examines applications in two disparate fields linked by the importance of valuing information: public health and space. Researchers in the health field have developed some of the most innovative methodologies for valuing information, used to help determine, for example, the value of diagnostics in informing patient treatment decisions. In the field of space, recent applications of value-of-information methods are critical for informing decisions on investment in satellites that collect data about air quality, fresh water supplies, climate and other natural and environmental resources affecting global health and quality of life.
Download or read book Essays on Quantitative Marketing and Economics written by Nan Chen and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In two essays, I present my work that applies empirical method to real-world problems in quantitative marketing and economics. In the first chapter, I use structural econometrics to investigate airlines' dynamic price competition. I show how widely-used dynamic pricing techniques affect firms profits under a competitive equilibrium. The second chapter is a joint work with Zemin Zhong. We focus on how China's anticorruption effort impact its economy, measured by car consumption and new business registration. Dynamic pricing is becoming a common practice in many industries, but its effect under competition is uncertain due to the potential for the Prisoner's dilemma. The paper studies profit and welfare implications of competitive dynamic pricing in the context of the airline industry. The paper develops a structural dynamic oligopoly model where firms compete in selling limited capacities when facing demand fluctuations. The supply and demand are jointly estimated using a unique daily-level data on airfares and capacity utilization. The identification leverages a natural experiment of carrier exit. The estimates show that air travel demand exhibits a large degree of temporal heterogeneity and stochastic variability. The counterfactuals show that the ability to perform dynamic pricing increases total welfare. In particular, (i) price discrimination (charging late-arriving consumers higher prices) softens competition in the late market and increases profits substantially and (ii) revenue management (pricing on remaining capacities) intensifies competition and does not increase profits. Corruption could either benefit economic growth by “greasing the wheel,” or distort supply of public goods and create inefficiency. Empirically testing the impact of corruption is difficult due to its evasive nature. We take an alternative approach by investigating the economic impacts of anti-corruption policies. We focus on China's recent anti-corruption campaign, the largest of its kind in recent history. As an important initiative of this campaign, the Communist Party's Provincial Committees of Discipline Inspection (PCDI) send inspector teams to investigate municipal governments for potential corruption. The variation in their timing allows us to use a difference-in-difference design to identify their impact on local economy. Using two unique administrative datasets of vehicle and business registration, we find that PCDI visits have a negative impact on both car sales and new business entry. For vehicles, the effect is surprisingly uniform across different price tiers: Luxury brands exhibit a similar drop as domestic brands, suggesting corruption's impact permeates households across a wide income spectrum. Over time, the effect is strengthening: We observe a 2\% drop in the first three months of PCDI visit and a 10\% drop one year afterward. The especially large impact cannot be explained by the decline in government officials' consumption behavior, suggesting anti-corruption efforts also affect the private sector. We test the idea using business registration data, and we found PCDI visits indeed discourage new business registration. We validate our empirical strategy by showing that (1) the timing of PCDI visits cannot be predicted by observable county characteristics and (2) car registrations exhibit parallel pre-treatment trends. Our results suggest there may be a trade-off in anti-corruption and economic growth.
Download or read book Three Essays in Financial Markets The Bright Side of Financial Derivatives Options Trading and Firm Innovation written by Iván Blanco and published by Ed. Universidad de Cantabria. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do financial derivatives enhance or impede innovation? We aim to answer this question by examining the relationship between equity options markets and standard measures of firm innovation. Our baseline results show that firms with more options trading activity generate more patents and patent citations per dollar of R&D invested. We then investigate how more active options markets affect firms' innovation strategy. Our results suggest that firms with greater trading activity pursue a more creative, diverse and risky innovation strategy. We discuss potential underlying mechanisms and show that options appear to mitigate managerial career concerns that would induce managers to take actions that boost short-term performance measures. Finally, using several econometric specifications that try to account for the potential endogeneity of options trading, we argue that the positive effect of options trading on firm innovation is causal.
Download or read book Essays in Quantitative Marketing written by Yingze Song and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter explores the effect of personalized recommendations on consumer behavior. Personalized recommendations are known for their ability to navigate shoppers to the most relevant products first, saving their time. However, the hidden cost is that shoppers are less likely to find other desirable products along the search process serendipitously. Such a potential cost casts doubts on whether websites should adopt personalized recommendations. I suggest a positive spillover effect of gained efficiency from personalized recommendations: consumers explore more because increased search efficiency countervails an increasing opportunity cost of time. In addition, total shopping time is expected to decrease because the new equilibrium marginal benefit of exploration is lower. I examine these hypotheses empirically using field experiment data from one of China's biggest grocery delivery platforms. My findings are consistent with these hypotheses: consumers reduce search, spend more time exploring other categories and make more purchases while lowering their total shopping time. These findings are important because they show consumers active explorations under time pressure and they demonstrate a demand increasing mechanism of increasing search efficiency through personalized recommendations. The second chapter is joint work with Mingxi Zhu. This chapter studies information disclosure in auctions. Bidding in search advertising is commonplace today. However, determining a bid can be challenging in light of the complexity of the auction process. By designing the mechanism and aggregating the information of many bidders, the advertiser platform can assist less sophisticated advertisers. We analyze data from a platform that initiated a bid recommendation system and find that some advertisers may simply adopt the platform's suggestion instead of constructing their own bids. We discover that these less sophisticated advertisers were lower-rated and uncertain about ad effectiveness before the platform began offering information through the recommended bids. We characterize an equilibrium model of bidding in the Generalized Second Price (GSP) auction and show that following the platform's bid suggestion is theoretically sub-optimal. We then identify sophisticated and less sophisticated advertisers' private values using observed bids and the disclosed information. Counterfactual results suggest that the ad platform can increase revenue and the total surplus when it shares more information. Furthermore, the hybrid of auto-bidding with manual bidding could be a more efficient mechanism as we substitute less sophisticated bidding behavior for algorithmic bidding. These results shed light on the importance of exploring interactions between sophisticated and less sophisticated players when designing a market.
Download or read book Essays in Quantitative Marketing written by Jessica Yu and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first chapter investigates search and matching in online marketplaces, emphasizing how user behavior responds to the presence of others on the platform, which I call ``market thickness". Unlike standard settings in which firms typically benefit from increasing their customer base, in two-sided markets, changes in market thickness can induce complex effects in matching due to the endogenous adjustment of search and selectivity. Motivated by the observed correlation between an individual's selectivity and the number of potential matches and competitors in this market, this chapter causally measures the independent effects of market size and competition size on behavior and explores its implications for platform design in the context of online dating. I design and implement a field experiment that varies information sent to platform participants about the number of potential matches (market size) and number of competitors. Consistent with intuition and observational patterns, the experiment shows that individuals become more selective when they are told that they have more potential matches, and less selective when they are told they have more competition. The effect of changes in selectivity on matching is however an equilibrium outcome. I therefore use the exogenous variation generated by the experiment to identify the parameters of a microfounded model, which then allows me to estimate the equilibrium and evaluate platform-design-linked counterfactuals. I find that matching exhibits decreasing returns to scale when more men and women join the platform, and an increase in market size does not necessarily increase match quality due to heterogeneous effects of market thickness on selectivity. I then show how changing selectivity through a platform design feature may mitigate negative effects of changes in market and competition size. The second chapter is joint work with Megan Hunter. This chapter studies information avoidance and explores its impacts on financial health. We find that individuals who would benefit the most from information about their financial health are the ones who are most likely to avoid the information. In a setting where individuals opt in to receive information about their credit score, we document that the individuals who experience a decrease in their credit score are less likely to seek information about their credit report in the future. Through a series of A/B tests on email campaigns, we measure the causal effect of checking credit information on future credit scores for information avoiders. We find that checking credit information decreases credit scores by 30 points for individuals who are likely to avoid information, compared to individuals who are not likely to avoid information. This finding suggests that encouraging people to access information when they are doing worse can actually worsen their outcomes. The final chapter, which is joint work with Wesley Hartmann, involves measuring frequency effects from advertising. Firms regularly use multiple creatives in their advertising campaigns. This may help them reach diverse sets of consumers with creatives tailored more toward each of their needs and may mitigate the diminishing marginal effects of consumers repeatedly seeing the same creative. We measure the effect of multiple creatives in the context of the Super Bowl, which allows us to disentangle this effect from frequency effects that might also exist when airing the same creative. We assess this question by using exogenous variation in viewership across different creative airings within Super Bowl that arises from the way viewership changes with the score of the game. One challenge unique to measuring frequency effects with multiple creatives is that frequency effects may be difficult to separate from variation in creative effectiveness. To address this challenge, we first show that heterogeneity in creative effectiveness can be explained by the creative's likeability. We then build a model of goodwill accumulation that accounts for both frequency and creative effectiveness. The model estimates confirm that likability captures heterogeneity in creative effectiveness and illustrates that including measures of creative effectiveness affect inference about frequency effects of advertising. We also show that not controlling for the creative's baseline level of effectiveness can confound the estimation of frequency effects.
Download or read book Three essays on empirical finance written by Tse-Chun Lin and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2009 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Agricultural Marketing written by Kenneth Roger Weiss and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 746 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays on economic integration written by and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Quality of Political Decision Making written by Klaas Beniers and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2006-11 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In representative democracies, citizens give politicians the authority to design, implement, and evaluate a wide variety of policies. Delegating tasks to elected officials may create agency problems between citizens and their politicians. Politicians may
Download or read book Networks and learning written by Jurjen Johannes Antonie Kamphorst and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Trade and Development written by Tereso S. Tullao and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Three Essays on Examining the Relationship Between Education and Labor Market and Health Outcomes written by Jeremy Arkes and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The risk of investment in human capital written by Simona Maria Raita and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book On technology uncertainty and economic growth written by Koen G. Berden and published by Rozenberg Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
