Essays in experimental industrial organization on economic issues of the digital age

Digitization shapes many aspects of our everyday life, including professional and social interactions, knowledge acquisition and dissemination, cultural exchange, entertainment, and – last but not least – economic activities. Accordingly, digitization has caused a shift in some strands of the economic literature. Studies in industrial organization incorporate potentially biased consumer behavior and reflect technological advances such as history-based price discrimination, data brokerage, multisided platforms, and personalized advertisements, among others. Given that we face a vast range of impacts of digitization on economics and markets, this dissertation focuses on some key aspects. Using methods of theoretical industrial organization and experimental behavioral economics, this dissertation tackles issues of price discrimination, privacy concern and crowdfunding. First, I provide a methodological contribution, reassessing what inferences can be drawn on behavior-based pricing tools from laboratory market experiments. I find that price distortions can be explained but not necessarily circumvented. Second, drawing from the insights of the first study, we theoretically and experimentally study a richer framework, incorporating endogenous privacy choices for consumers in two data environments. An open data environment where consumers’ purchasing histories are readily available to all firms benefits consumers at the cost of total welfare compared to an exclusive data environment where firms individually hold information over purchasing histories, i.e., the current status quo. Lastly, we study how innate coordination problems of reward-based crowdfunding mechanisms can be remedied. We find that rebates are a suitable and easy-to-use tool that improves the success rate of projects, as backers are willing to pledge higher amounts.

Author dc:creator

• Tolksdorf, Michel

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Ivanova-Stenzel, Radosveta

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.14279/depositonce-19113

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:depositonce.tu-berlin.de:11303/20315