UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
Browse
8 results
Search Results
Item ESSAYS ON FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS AND FIRMS IN CHINA(2014) Zhao, Jianzhi; Swagel, Phillip Lee; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)My dissertation examines the impact of this misallocation of credit on firms' investment activities and productivity, drawing important implications regarding the potential for sustained economic growth in China. Understanding the relationship between China's financial system and the overall economy is critical to assessing the proper directions for reforms and thus for understanding China's future economic prospects. My dissertation investigate these links using data that cover the output, employment, and credit usage of hundreds of thousands of businesses in China, drawing on large firm-year data. The first chapter of my dissertation addresses two related topics: (1) the relationship between financial constraints based on firm ownership status and the investment behavior of each firm; (2) the impact on investment of the government's policy to "Grasp the Large, Let Go of the Small" in which the official sector of China looks to lessen the advantages of smaller SOEs but maintain them for larger enterprises. This is a crucial policy issue for China, since understanding the investment behavior of firms is central to assessing the impact of reforms that affect the state-owned firms and move China yet further toward a market-oriented economy. Chapter two then investigates the impact on firms' productivity growth of credit misallocation related to state ownership. The preferential access to credit enjoyed by SOEs affects investment as noted in the first chapter and this in turn affects productivity growth. This paper assesses whether the easy access to credit enjoyed by state-owned firms translates into slower productivity growth--that is, whether easy financing makes firms lazy. If so, then further moves to the market have immense potential to generate continued income gains. Chapter three explores the relationship between the liberalization of banking sector, government debt and macroeconomic stability in China. This paper sets out the policy implications of bad lending for the financial sector and the public balance sheet. Reforms that sustain growth matter immensely for China. But with the Chinese economy increasingly linked to the entire world economy, better policy is vital for prosperity in the United States and all other nations.Item Essays on Bundling, Compatibility and Competition(2013) Vamosiu, Adriana C.; Vincent, Daniel R; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The bundling literature has devoted much attention to the use of this pricing strategy as a deterrent to entry of a rival or the foreclosing of one. However, there are numerous industries where a two-product seller is a monopolist in one market and competes in the second, where neither entry was deterred, nor the rival was foreclosed. The first chapter makes progress in developing a framework that analyzes the profitability of bundling for such a two-product firm. Consumers are assumed to have negatively correlated valuations for the two types of products. We show that in equilibrium, the two-product seller will offer the products only in a bundle, thus preventing any consumer from forming his own bundle using the rival's product. Furthermore, he ensures himself highest profits by having all consumers interested in only the monopoly product purchase the bundle. The welfare results under this strategy show the consumers being harmed the most, as they would prefer variety in the bundle formation and/or being able to purchase only the monopoly product, should they choose to. Compatibility of products has been addressed mostly in a mix and match scenario, where a consumer must purchase two different components to form the final system. The components themselves have no individual use. In the second chapter, we further extend this type of framework, by assuming that one of the two components (the platform) does have a stand alone use. The other type of product is offered by only one of the firms in the market, has no individual use, but could enhance the utility of one's platform. Therefore, the firm offering the complement must first decide whether to make it compatible with the rival platform and, furthermore, what pricing strategy is best. There are two types of consumers in the market: new and legacies. The new consumers are interested in platforms and, depending on compatibility, the complement. Legacy consumers are those who have already purchased a platform in a previous period and, currently, are only interested, if at all, in the complement. We find that compatibility is optimal, as it reduces competition and maximizes profits. In such an outcome, the two-product seller offers the goods a la carte. If compatibility is not feasible due to exogenous factors, the legacy consumers in the market are of great importance. Our results indicate that the profit maximizing strategy depends on the mass of the two-product seller's legacy consumers in the market relative to the rival's.Item Essays on Information Flows and Auction Outcomes in Business-to-Business Market: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence(2013) Pilehvar, Ali; Elmaghraby, Wedad; Gopal, Anandasivam; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I have three separate essays in the context of Business-to Business (B2B) auctions; in each I introduce a complex problem regarding the impact of information flows on auction's performance which has not been addressed by prior auction literature. The first two essays (Chapter 1 and 2) are empirical studies in the context of online secondary market B2B auctions while the third essay (Chapter 3) is a theoretical investigation and will contribute to the B2B procurement auction literature. The findings from this dissertation have managerial implications of how/when auctioneers can improve the efficiency or success of their operations. B2B auctions are new types of ventures which have begun to shape how industries of all types trade goods. Online B2B auctions have also become particularly popular for industrial procurement and liquidation purposes. By using online B2B auctions companies can benefit by creating competition when auctioning off goods or contracts to business customers. B2B Procurement auctions− where the buyer runs an auction to procure goods and services from suppliers− have been documented as saving firms millions of dollars by lowering the cost of procurement. On the other hand, B2B auctions are also commonly used by sellers in `secondary market' to liquidate the left-over goods to business buyers in a timely fashion. In order to maximize revenues in either both industrial procurement or secondary market settings, auctioneers should understand how the auction participants behave and react to the available market information or auction design. Auctioneers can then use this knowledge to improve the performance of their B2B auctions by choosing the right auction design or strategies. In the first essay, I investigate how an online B2B secondary market auction environment can provide several sources of information that can be used by bidders to form their bids. One such information set that has been relatively understudied in the literature pertains to reference prices available to the bidder from other concurrent and comparable auctions. I will examine how reference prices from such auctions affect bidding behavior on the focal auction conditioning on bidders' types. I will use longitudinal data of auctions and bids for more than 4000 B2B auctions collected from a large liquidator firm in North America. In the second essay, I report on the results of a field experiment that I carried out on a secondary market auction site of another one of the nation's largest B2B wholesale liquidators. The design of this field experiment on iPad marketplace is directly aimed at understanding how (i) the starting price of the auction, and (ii) the number of auctions for a specific (model, quality), i.e., the supply of that product, interact to impact the auction final price. I also explore how a seller should manage the product differentiation so that she auctions off the right mix and supply of products at the reasonable starting prices. Finally, in the last essay, I study a norm used in many procurement auctions in which buyers grant the `Right of First Refusal' (ROFR) to a favored supplier. Under ROFR, the favored supplier sees the bids of all other participating suppliers and has the opportunity to match the (current) winning bid. I verify the conventional wisdom that ROFR increases the buyer's procurement cost in a single auction setting. With a looming second auction in the future (with the same participating suppliers), I show that the buyer lowers his procurement cost by granting the ROFR to a supplier. The analytical findings of this essay highlights the critical role of information flows and the timing of information-release in procurement auctions with ROFR.Item Enabling environments(2012) Farmanesh, Amir; Graham, Carol; Schelling, Thomas C.; Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A strong and growing private sector is a critical factor for the promotion of growth and the increase of opportunities for all. A vibrant business sector would mean economic investment, job creation, improvement in overall productivity, and an increase in the economic pie for all those involved in a society. To foster the growth of a legal business sector, governments and policy makers around the world have been interested in learning about effective policies and implementing wide-ranging reforms. This general policy climate which supports and enhances the growth of the formal private business sector has been called a business-enabling environment. The fundamental premise is that growth of the official business sector of economic activity requires good regulations, strong economic fundamentals, and a nourishing sociopolitical structure. The question to which this dissertation responds is which of these factors are quantitatively significant in describing the number of registered businesses worldwide and how these factors compare to each other when they are tested econometrically beside each other. Would the ease of doing business variables still be significant in describing the number of registered businesses when it is compared to fundamental macro policy factors such as corporate tax rate? How far does business bribery affect business growth? This dissertation presents an effort to quantitatively analyze these factors and their effects on the business growth worldwide. It also offers an estimate on the amount of annual business to government bribery around the world disaggregated to a national level. It offers an estimation of national annual bribes paid by the business sector to governments, in each country worldwide, in the currency of that country at the time, and the equivalent amount in US dollars.Item ESSAYS IN (I) STRATEGIC ORDERING WITH ENDOGENOUS SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IN SUPPLY CHAIN (II) STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT OF NEW PRODUCT INNOVATION AND PROCESS IMPROVEMENT(2012) Kim, Yongjae; Xu, Yi; Goyal, Manu; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation discusses two research problems. First topic is strategic information management in supply chain, and second topic is analytical modeling approach in productivity dilemma. The first two chapters of dissertation discuss the impact of information asymmetry and competition on vertical contractual relationships, and risk neutral firms' strategic ordering decisions with minimal assumptions. Modern business environment caused by competition and information asymmetry plagues most firms across industries, often leading to suboptimal outcomes. Given the lead times in planning capacity, suppliers prefer earlier orders from their downstream partners (retailers). Much attention has been given in the literature to Advance Purchase Discount (APD), where the supplier lowers the wholesale price to entice the retailers to order early. In this dissertation, we suggest another avenue of early purchase model considering more realistic ways - competition between downstream retailers and information flows (from information acquisition to dissemination) in supply chain. We show that with one retailer having "better" market demand information on uncertain demand than the other, the supplier can induce earlier ordering from the better-informed retailer without any reduction in the wholesale price, or creating rationing risk. In addition, we investigate firm's information investment decisions corresponding to the timing of the orders. We extend the model with different information structures of firms such as imperfect and evolving information. In reality, firms can have more accurate market information near the selling season by acquiring it from more diverse resources. Consistent with practice, we explorer firm's equilibrium outcomes of endogenous sequencing game with this setting. The third chapter of dissertation is in the trade-off between production efficiency and new product innovation. A firm's ability to compete over time has been rooted not only in improved efficiency, but also in its ability to be simultaneously innovative (Abernathy (1978)). This trade-off between efficiency and innovation has long been discussed in the business context, but limited analytical research has been done using the `extreme value theory' (Dahan & Mendelson (2001)) to investigate this issue. Our model considers important exogenous innovation factors such as innovation characteristics (Benner & Tushman (2003)) and degree of competition, which has yielded the following theoretical results and practical implications. First, we highlight new product characteristics. If R&D projects are paradigm-shifting innovations, there is a stronger adverse effect between efficiency and innovation than incremental innovation. Second, competition results in underinvestment effort in innovation performance for the firms. For example, in the symmetric firms' competition, the optimal size of R&D projects decreased, as competition increases. On the other hand, firms are more likely to focus on process improvement activities.Item PRODUCT VARIETY, SERVICE VARIETY, AND THEIR IMPACT ON DISTRIBUTORS(2011) Wan, Xiang; Dresner, Martin; Evers, Philip; Business and Management: Logistics, Business & Public Policy; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite considerable research relating to product variety, few studies have analyzed the impact of product variety on distributors. Furthermore, compared to research on product variety, service variety has been overlooked in the literature. This dissertation consists of three essays: Essay One examines the direct effect of product variety on sales, its indirect effect on sales through stockouts, as well as the total impact of product variety on sales performance. Essay Two develops a moderated mediation model to investigate how service quality and market performance are affected by service variety and the interaction impacts of different types of services. Essay Three analyzes a dynamic system, which includes influences of product and service variety on demand and costs and their reverse impacts on variety decisions.Item Three Empirical Studies in Market Design(2009) Stocking, Andrew James; Cramton, Peter; Lange, Andreas; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Market design is the development of mechanisms that improve market efficiency and build on an understanding of the interaction between human behavior and market rules. The first chapter considers the sale of a charitable membership where the charity poses the market design question of how to price these memberships to capture the maximum value from donors' altruism. Using an online natural field experiment with over 700,000 subjects, this chapter tests theory on price discounts and shows large differences in donation behavior between donors who have previously given money and/or volunteered. For example, framing the charity's membership price as a discount increases response rates and decreases conditional contributions from former volunteers, but not from past money donors. This chapter thereby demonstrates the importance of conditioning fundraising strategies on the specifics of past donation dimensions. The second chapter examines an auction used to solve the assignment and price determination problems where price depends on the propensity to own or farm the land, a non-market good. This chapter studies bidder behavior in a reverse auction where landowners compete to sell and retire the right to develop their farmland. A reduced form bidding model is used to estimate the role of bidder competition, winner's curse correction, and the underlying distribution of private values. The chapter concludes that the auction enrolled as much as 3,000 acres (12 percent) more than a take-it-or-leave-it offer (i.e., non-auction program) would have enrolled for the same budgetary cost. Finally, the third chapter considers the online advertising word auction. The pricing determination and assignment problem must occur for over 2,000 consumer searches each second. Theory is developed where asymmetric advertisers compete and an advertiser-optimal equilibrium bidding strategy is presented that is robust to this asymmetry. Within this rich strategy space, it is shown that advertiser subsidization can be revenue increasing for the search engine. Using a novel dataset of more than 4,500 keyword bids by three firms on four search engines, a simulation of the auction environment illustrates that bidder subsidization is indeed revenue positive and can be improved upon by imposing bid caps or fixed bids on the subsidized bidder.Item ESSAYS IN EMPIRICAL INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION(2009) Chesnes, Matthew William; Rust, John; Jin, Ginger; Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Chapter 1: Capacity and Utilization Choice in the US Oil Refining Industry This paper presents a new dynamic model of the operating and investment decisions of US oil refiners. The model enables me to predict how shocks to crude oil prices and refinery shutdowns (e.g., in response to hurricanes) affect the price of gasoline, refinery profits, and overall welfare. There have been no new refineries built in the last 32 years, and although existing refineries have expanded their capacity by almost 13% since 1995, the demand for refinery products has grown even faster. As a result, capacity utilization rates are now near their maximum sustainable levels, and when combined with record high crude oil prices, this creates a volatile environment for energy markets. Shocks to the price of crude oil and even minor disruptions to refining capacity can have a large effect on the downstream prices of refined products. Due to the extraordinary dependence by other industries on petroleum products, this can have a large effect on the US economy as a whole. I use the generalized method of moments to estimate a dynamic model of capacity and utilization choice by oil refiners. Plants make short-run utilization rate choices to maximize their expected discounted profits and may make costly long-term investments in capacity to meet the growing demand and reduce the potential for breaking down. I show that the model fits the data well, in both in-sample and out-of-sample predictive tests, and I use the model to conduct a number of counterfactual experiments. My model predicts that a 20% increase in the price of crude oil is only partially passed on to consumers, resulting in higher gasoline prices, lower profits for the refinery, and a 45% decrease in total welfare. A disruption to refining capacity, such as the one caused by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, raises gasoline prices by almost 16% and has a small negative effect on overall welfare: the higher profits of refineries partially offsets the large reduction in consumer surplus. As the theory predicts, these shocks have a smaller effect on downstream prices when consumer demand is more elastic, resulting in a larger share of total welfare going to the consumer. Chapter 2: Consumer Search for Online Drug Information Consumers are increasingly turning to the internet and using search engines to find information on medicinal drugs. Between 2001 and 2007, the number of adults using the internet as an alternative source of health information doubled. At the same time, online and offline advertising spending by drug companies is growing rapidly. I seek to understand how consumers use search engines to find drug information and how this activity is influenced by direct to consumer advertising. I utilize a database of user click-through data from America Online to analyze the search behavior of consumers seeking drug information online. Compared with other searches, users submitting drug-related queries are more likely to click on more than one result in a search session, and when they do, they click more rapidly through the results and tend to migrate away from dot-com sites and toward those ending in dot-org and dot-net. Offline advertising on a drug serves to increase the frequency and intensity of these searches. Chapter 3: Drug Information via Online Search Engines This paper utilizes a database of organic and sponsored search results from four large search engines to analyze the supply of drug-related information available on the internet. I show that the information varies significantly across search engines, domain extensions, and between organic and sponsored results. Regression results reveal that websites with relatively more promotional content are pushed down in the search results while informational sites (including those ending in dot-gov and dot-org) are more likely to appear on page one of the results.