Three Essays on Industrial Organization

In this dissertation I study three topics in Industrial Organization. In the first chapter I characterize a set of subgame perfect Nash equilibria in the alternating-offers bargaining game with one-sided outside option and differentiated depreciation rates. I use this set of equilibria to solve the hold-up problem. In the second chapter I study seller behavior using data from eBay auctions of used tractors. I relax the standard assumption that sellers know the distribution functions of items' valuations and find that uninformed and patient sellers use secret reserve prices to run unsuccessful eBay auctions to learn parameters of these unknown distribution functions. In the third chapter I study a model of quality sorting between electronic and physical platforms. I use Spence's signaling model (1973) to derive seller's equilibrium listing strategy. I find that conditional on the quality of the transparent attribute, the quality of the opaque attribute in a physical platform is always no worse than the quality of the opaque attribute in an electronic platform. I also find that when items on sale have both transparent and opaque attributes, it is impossible to compare the item's overall quality in both platforms without restricting bidders' beliefs about the quality of the opaque attribute in an electronic platform or without introducing an additional structure into the model.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

The Ohio State University

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Olimov, Jafar M.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Roe, Brian

• Economics
• Agricultural Economics

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: some rights reserved. It is licensed for use under a Creative Commons license. Specific terms and permissions are available from this document's record in the OhioLINK ETD Center.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1366979858

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:osu1366979858