This dissertation studies a variety of consumer behaviors and their strategic implications for firm profit maximization. The first chapter discusses how bundle pricing (via shipping policies) allows firms to achieve higher profits than component pricing when consumers's tastes for products are correlated. The second chapter illustrates how durable good producers...
This dissertation contains two studies. In Chapter 1, I implement a randomized intervention to measure the effect of reminders for timely payment of credit cards. While I find an 13% reduction in the cost of late payment fees paid, 31% of the users that avoid credit card late payments, incur...
This dissertation examines various means by which the profit motives of media firms can directly result in biased information transmission. In the first two chapters, I analyze to what extent conflicts of interest in expert review industries may result in artificially inflated reviews, with a particular application to the video...
I examine horizontally differentiated firms in three different contexts. First, I look at an industry where firms can develop self-customizable products -- products which appeal to different consumers for different reasons. This addition results in an unexpected conclusion that sometimes more differentiated firms can end up with lower profits than...
In the first chapter, I study how political institutions can affect policymaking when the economy is in transition. I develop a framework where a transition process gradually restructures economic institutions so that the population's long-term preference may differ from its short-term preference. A democracy may fail to implement the optimal...
The first chapter investigates the offshoring decision from a network capacity investment perspective. We analyze a firm that manufactures two products to serve two geographically separated markets using a common component and two localized final assemblies. Two strategic network design questions arise naturally: (1) Should the common part be produced...
The first essay examines how the shift between single-tasking and multitasking influences productivity and workers' bargaining power, and its implications on the distribution of earnings between management and workers. Under single-tasking, a firm can obtain high productivity because workers' hold-up power can provide them with larger incentives to work. In...
In this dissertation, I analyse the effectiveness of various political institutions in aggregating private information. In the first two chapters, I consider diversity of information among the voters about given electoral alternatives and examine the conditions under which plurality rule voting aggregates such information. In the third chapter, I consider...
This thesis contains four essays on the organization (both internal and external) of health care in the US. The first essay examines a mechanism through which individual workers acquire (or maintain) competence, namely that of experience. Specifically, I analyze whether cardiac surgeons who perform more procedures experience an improvement in...
This dissertation considers price indices in the context of two rapidly growing markets. The first is the emerging market for Internet Service Providers in the mid-1990s. The second is the emergence and growth of the DVD hardware market. In both, we examine indices ranging from the most rudimentary to quality...