Essays in industrial organization

This thesis is a collection of three chapters that investigate burgeoning empirical issues in industrial organization. In the first chapter, I study platform fee policy with a specific focus on two-sided online marketplaces. The main contributions of the paper are threefold. First, I study a setting with coordinated price experimentation along the three different fee dimensions that are common to such marketplaces. Second, I describe the empirical impact of incomplete fee salience on equilibrium outcomes. Finally, I quantify the network externalities that must be present in order for observed fees to constitute an equilibrium. In the paper, I begin by developing a tractable model of the platform's problem that generates testable predictions and yields equilibrium conditions in terms of estimable quantities. Then, using estimates from experimental data obtained from a large online marketplace, I quantify the salience and network effects.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Grondahl, Samuel Isaac.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Nikhil Agarwal and Glenn Ellison.

• Economics.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128997

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/128997