Jimena Soledad FERRARO will defend her thesis on"Essays in Applied Microeconomics" on Friday, December 2, 2016 10 am, room MF 323
Supervisor : Bruno JullienSenior Researcher CNRS & TSE, University of Toulouse Capitole
Memberships are:
- Christian BONTEMPS, TSE Researcher, University of Toulouse Capitole
- Bruno JULLIEN, Senior Researcher CNRS & TSE, University of Toulouse Capitole
- Marc BOURREAU, Researcher, Telecom ParisTech
- Tommaso VALLETTI, Researcher, Imperial College London
Abstract:
This thesis in applied microeconomics is composed of three chapters, each one addressing a different question.
The first chapter, “Sequential distribution in the presence of Piracy”, shows how firms can exploit the timing of the release of digital content as a way to mitigate the effects of piracy, in a world where some piracy is unavoidable. We develop an analytical model where a monopolist produces a particular good, and it can choose the time at which its product is available to consumers. On top of deciding on prices, the monopolist also chooses the share of the product it releases at each period. In the absence of piracy, firm’s profits are independent of the way in which content is released. However, when piracy is a real threat, the firm can soften its effect by strategically selecting the share of the product offered in each period, changing consumers’ valuation and making piracy less attractive from their perspective. The monopolist benefits from releasing content in two different periods in an asymmetric way which find analogies in real life examples such as the market of specialised software tools or of TV shows.
The second chapter, “Shill bidding in common value auctions”, presents the effects of a particular cheating environment in common value auctions. Shill bidding consists of placing anonymous bids on the seller’s behalf to artificially drive up the prices of the auctioned item. We build a simple model to understand the incentives a seller has to shill bid in an English common value auction where the bidders’ private information is drawn from a discrete distribution. We show how the discreteness affects the seller’s ex-ante expected gain of shill bidding, and we also show how the seller updates his shill bid based on the new information he receives as the auction goes on. We find that if the number of signals is low, the seller might be better off refraining from participating even when bidders are fully myopic. Moreover, for any number of signals in the auction, if the number of participants is sufficiently high, the shill bidding strategy always deteriorates the seller’s expected profits.
The third chapter, “Physician convenience and cesarean section delivery”, is co-authored with Shagun Khare and Alan Acosta. This paper analyses the causes that might explain the high rate of cesarean section in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that far exceeds the World Health Organization recommendation. The supplier-induced demand hypothesis, which predicts more c-section deliveries than otherwise medically needed, might be the reason for this disparity. In this paper, using a survey of pregnant women in Buenos Aires, we study one aspect of the physician’s incentives to induce demand: convenience. We look at whether a woman’s chance of getting a c-section depends on the period of delivery, i.e. whether it is a working day or not. Setting aside scheduled c-sections, we find that convenience matters, but only in private hospitals. We also find that women who state that they prefer c-sections over natural births have a higher chance of having a c-section in private hospitals. While physicians’ convenience and mothers’ preferences do matter, our research finds that the institutional environment plays a defining role in how much these matters.
