Essays in Industrial Organization: The Effects of Vertical Integration on Prices and New Product Introduction

This dissertation consists of three essays that study the effects of vertical integration in the field of industrial organization. The first chapter studies the effects of vertical integration on the vertically integrated company, specifically, the effects on prices and new product introduction. The second chapter studies the effects of vertical integration on the vertically integrated company's competitor. The third chapter studies the effects of vertical integration on the new product introduction in detail, and discusses the important policy implications.In the first chapter, I study the effects of vertical integration on the vertically integrated company, specifically, the effects on prices and new product introduction. Upstream and downstream companies both charge markups, and separated production generally incurs higher cost. Different incentives of upstream and downstream companies and high negotiation costs may impede new product introduction process. Vertical integration solves these problems. This chapter studies empirically the effects of vertical integration: whether it leads to a price decrease, which comes from synergy and the elimination of double marginalization; and whether it leads to more new products introduced to market, because it eases the new product introduction process. Specifically, this chapter studies the 2010 vertical integrations of the two largest soda companies, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, with their largest downstream bottlers, respectively, by using bottlers’ territory maps together with prices and sales data. In this chapter, all carbonated soft drink master brands of The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo are included in the analysis. Results show that the vertical integrations lead to 0.3%-0.6% price decrease for products of The Coca-Cola Company and 1.4%-1.6% price decrease for products of PepsiCo; and they lead to more new products introduced to vertically integrated markets: annually 9%-10% more new products for The Coca-Cola Company, and 5%-8% more new products for PepsiCo.In the second chapter, I study the effects of vertical integration on the vertically integrated company's competitor, specifically, the effects on prices and new product introduction. The vertically integrated bottlers (Coca-Cola Enterprises, Pepsi Bottling Group and Pepsi Americas) bottled Dr Pepper's products both before and after the vertical integration. For Dr Pepper Snapple Group, its competitors, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo, controlled its downstream bottlers after the vertical integrations. In the soda industry, the bottlers set the price of final products. Furthermore, if the upstream company wants to introduce a new product, it needs to negotiate with downstream bottlers for them to bottle and distribute the products. After the vertical integration, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo have incentives to increase the price of the Dr Pepper's products so that consumers will substitute from Dr Pepper's products to Coca-Cola's and Pepsi Cola's products. Furthermore, when Dr Pepper wants to introduce a new product, The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo may impede this process, leading to fewer new products from Dr Pepper, which will be beneficial for The Coca-Cola Company and PepsiCo. Empirically, only products of three master brands, Coca-Cola, Pepsi Cola and Dr Pepper, are included in the analysis. Results show that the vertical integrations lead to 0.7%-1.0% price decrease for products of Coca-Cola, 1.4%-2.2% price decrease for products of Pepsi Cola, and 0.3%-0.7% price increase for products of Dr Pepper. For the new product introduction, vertical integrations lead to more new products for the vertically integrated company and fewer new products for the vertically integrated company's competitor: annually 12%-13% more new products of Coca-Cola, 10%-12% more new products of Pepsi Cola, and 9%-15% fewer new products of Dr Pepper.In the third chapter, I study more about these new products and about how vertical integration affects new product introduction process. Products are defined using six characteristics. For each new product, I find out what is the new characteristics of this product. For all the new products introduced before vertical integration, I draw the distribution of these new characteristics, and I do the same for all new products introduced after vertical integration. I then study how vertical integration affects the distribution of new characteristics. For the new products of the vertically integrated company, after vertical integration, the distribution of new characteristics shifts from less innovative characteristics to more innovative characteristics. That is to say, the new products introduced after vertical integration are more innovative. For the new products of the vertically integrated company's competitor, after vertical integration, the distribution of new characteristics shifts from more innovative characteristics to less innovative characteristics. That is to say, the new products introduced after vertical integration are less innovative.I also discuss the important policy implications in the third chapter. The effect of vertical integration on new product introduction has not drawn much attention in vertical merger reviews and evaluations. The results of this research show that the effect of vertical integration on new product introduction should be emphasized in anti-trust policies and their enforcement. This policy implication is very important, especially when many recent high-profile merger cases are vertical integrations, such as the AT&T and Time Warner merger, etc. And the recent development of anti-trust policies echoes the results of this research

On Classification-Calibration of Gamma-Phi Losses

Gamma-Phi losses constitute a family of multiclass classification loss functions that generalize the logistic and other common losses, and have found application in the boosting literature. We establish the first general sufficient condition for the classification-calibration of such losses. In addition, we show that a previously proposed sufficient condition is in fact not sufficient.Comment: 21 page

Improving the bilateral сooperation between Ukraine and the people's republic of China

The purpose of this study is to scrutinize the bilateral economic and trade relations between China and Ukraine, and to assess prevailing trade and investment conditions and offer reference suggestions for both enterprises and governments. We use the analysis results of this thesis, combined with the current trade and investment conditions, to provide some reference suggestions for enterprises and governments. In this study, we will try to identify and evaluate the main areas of cooperation between China and Ukraine; determine the main directions and forms of cooperation between Ukraine and China; analyze the development of political relations between Ukraine and China at the government level; and understand the current situation of economic cooperation between Ukraine and China. main issues and prospects. In accordance with the set goal, the following tasks were defined and solved in the dissertation: to analysis of the content and principles of bilateral cooperation; to tools and methods of evaluating bilateral cooperation; to analysis of economic and trade integration and potential between Ukraine and China; to evaluation of Ukrainian-Chinese bilateral cooperation in the field of multinational corporate activities; to analysis of Ukraine - bilateral cooperation with China, focusing on the impact of technology transfer and immigration processes; to forecast of the prospects of bilateral cooperation between Ukraine and China; Analysis of the causes of bilateral economic and trade development problems between Ukraine and China; to suggestions for improving bilateral cooperation between Ukraine and China;Метою дослідження є ретельне дослідження двосторонніх економічних та торговельних відносин між Китаєм та Україною, аналізування провідних умов торгівлі та інвестування, а також рекомендації та пропозиції як для підприємств, так і для урядів. Завдання: розкрити походження та характер двостороннього співробітництва; вивчити механізм функціонування двостороннього співробітництва; проаналізувати реальний стан розвитку двосторонньої торгівлі між Україною та Китаєм; проаналізувати масштаби та структурні характеристики двосторонньої торгівлі між Україною та Китаєм з двох аспектів: масштаби та тенденції двосторонньої торгівлі між Україною та Китаєм та структурні характеристики імпортних та експортних товарів; розрахувати ступінь торговельної інтеграції між Україною та Китаєм та дослідити потенціал розвитку двосторонньої торгівлі між Україною та Китаєм шляхом побудови гравітаційної моделі; проаналізувати проблеми, що існують у розвитку двосторонньої торгівлі між Україною та Китаєм, та виявити їхні причини; окреслити поточні торговельні та інвестиційні умови білатерального співробітництва і надати рекомендації для бізнесу та урядів країн

A combinatorial characterization of the annihilator varieties of highest weight modules for classical Lie algebras

Let $\mathfrak{g}$ be a classical Lie algebra. Let $L(\lambda)$ be a highest weight module of $\mathfrak{g}$ with highest weight $\lambda-\rho$, where $\rho$ is half the sum of positive roots. In 1985, Joseph proved that the associated variety of a primitive ideal is the Zariski closure of a nilpotent orbit in $\mathfrak{g}^*$. In this paper, we will give some combinatorial characterizations of the annihilator varieties of highest weight modules for classical Lie algebras. In fact, we will give two algorithms, i.e., bipartition algorithm and partition algorithm.Comment: 40page

An Automatic Evaluation Framework for Multi-turn Medical Consultations Capabilities of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant success in interacting with human. However, recent studies have revealed that these models often suffer from hallucinations, leading to overly confident but incorrect judgments. This limits their application in the medical domain, where tasks require the utmost accuracy. This paper introduces an automated evaluation framework that assesses the practical capabilities of LLMs as virtual doctors during multi-turn consultations. Consultation tasks are designed to require LLMs to be aware of what they do not know, to inquire about missing medical information from patients, and to ultimately make diagnoses. To evaluate the performance of LLMs for these tasks, a benchmark is proposed by reformulating medical multiple-choice questions from the United States Medical Licensing Examinations (USMLE), and comprehensive evaluation metrics are developed and evaluated on three constructed test sets. A medical consultation training set is further constructed to improve the consultation ability of LLMs. The results of the experiments show that fine-tuning with the training set can alleviate hallucinations and improve LLMs' performance on the proposed benchmark. Extensive experiments and ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed framework.Comment: 10 pages, 9figure

N=2\mathcal{N} = 2 Schur index and line operators

4d $\mathcal{N} = 2$ SCFTs and their invariants can be often enriched by non-local BPS operators. In this paper we study the flavored Schur index of several types of N = 2 SCFTs with and without line operators, using a series of new integration formula of elliptic functions and Eisenstein series. We demonstrate how to evaluate analytically the Schur index for a series of $A_2$ class-$\mathcal{S}$ theories and the $\mathcal{N} = 4$ SO(7) theory. For all $A_1$ class-$\mathcal{S}$ theories we obtain closed-form expressions for SU(2) Wilson line index, and 't Hooft line index in some simple cases. We also observe the relation between the line operator index with the characters of the associated chiral algebras. Wilson line index for some other low rank gauge theories are also studied.Comment: 72 pages, 9 figures, 5 table

CoKe: Localized Contrastive Learning for Robust Keypoint Detection

Today's most popular approaches to keypoint detection involve very complex network architectures that aim to learn holistic representations of all keypoints. In this work, we take a step back and ask: Can we simply learn a local keypoint representation from the output of a standard backbone architecture? This will help make the network simpler and more robust, particularly if large parts of the object are occluded. We demonstrate that this is possible by looking at the problem from the perspective of representation learning. Specifically, the keypoint kernels need to be chosen to optimize three types of distances in the feature space: Features of the same keypoint should be similar to each other, while differing from those of other keypoints, and also being distinct from features from the background clutter. We formulate this optimization process within a framework, which we call CoKe, which includes supervised contrastive learning. CoKe needs to make several approximations to enable representation learning process on large datasets. In particular, we introduce a clutter bank to approximate non-keypoint features, and a momentum update to compute the keypoint representation while training the feature extractor. Our experiments show that CoKe achieves state-of-the-art results compared to approaches that jointly represent all keypoints holistically (Stacked Hourglass Networks, MSS-Net) as well as to approaches that are supervised by detailed 3D object geometry (StarMap). Moreover, CoKe is robust and performs exceptionally well when objects are partially occluded and significantly outperforms related work on a range of diverse datasets (PASCAL3D+, MPII, ObjectNet3D)