Essays on Industrial Organization
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In the first chapter, I quantify consumer inertia in the Korean mobile phone service market. Two sources of the inertia, consumer inattention, and incumbent brand effect are separately estimated by estimating a two-stage discrete choice model using individual-level mobile plan choice data in Korea from 2016 to 2018. I find that the probability of an incumbent's plan subscriber being attentive to alternative plans is only 13.8 percent, compared to 44 percent for an entrant's (Mobile Virtual Network Operator, or MVNO) plan subscriber. Consumers also associate the brand effect with incumbents' plans over MVNOs' offerings. Based on these findings, I explain the stagnant growth of MVNOs' market share in the Korean mobile phone service market. In the counterfactual analysis, I demonstrate that a hypothetical information intervention can increase consumer surplus.
In the second chapter, I study how consumers react to advertising on an innovative nondurable grocery product, a plant-based meat alternative (henceforth PBMA) burger patty in the Texas market. Using a panel random-effects binary logit model, I empirically distinguish the informative and prestige effects of advertising. I find that the two effects appear on Patty A's purchasing behavior, while the informative effect is more prominent than the prestige effect. Interestingly, the advertising spillover effect from within PBMA brands group dominates the impact of its own advertising in terms of magnitude. This implies that consumers tend to perceive PBMA patty products as a group much more than compartmentalizing the advertising exposure experience by brands. The number of previous product purchase experiences of the product is also an important factor to consider, as product purchase experience accumulation positively affects Patty A purchase odds, while the impact diminishes as the accumulation increases. I also find empirical evidence that supports substitutional relationship between Patty A and animal patty competitors, and the impact of household demographics on the purchase decision. Based on the empirical results, I derive a few suggestions for the PBMA producers.
The third chapter defines the burger patty market in Texas. This is an auxiliary chapter that provides further market insights on ongoing market issues based on the empirical product market definition result derived from demand and markup estimations. From a "small but significant and nontransitory increase (SSNIP)" test, I figure that PBMA patties should be included in the same market as animal meat patties.
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Jang, Shinjae. "Essays on Industrial Organization." (2023) Diss., Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/115176.