Estimation of the Effects of New Brands on Incumbents' Profits and Consumer Welfare: The U.S. Processed Cheese Market Case

We estimate the effects of new brands on market competition and consumer welfare in the U.S. processed cheese market. We find that an observed increase in consumer welfare was attributable mainly to an increase in the number of brands in the sample market, while the price effect, which measures welfare change caused by adding new brands to existing brands, decreased welfare as the prices of the existing brands increased in a large portion of sample markets. The price increase was most pronounced among the introducers existing brands.consumer welfare, incumbents, new brands, random coefficient model, Agribusiness, Consumer/Household Economics, Industrial Organization,

Market Structure, Price Pass-Through and Welfare with Differentiated Products

There is considerable literature on price pass-through modeling. This literature has focused on pass-through of cost shocks for homogenous products. To get results with the homogenous products case, empirical implementation has required the maintained hypothesis of competition, or agreement, in quantity modeling. A major contribution of this paper is modeling pass-through for a differentiated products market under the maintained hypothesis of price competition or price agreement. We estimate a mixed logit model for U.S processed cheese market using unbalanced panel data and implement a price pass through simulation and related consumer welfare analysis under different regimes of competition.Market Structure, Price Pass-Through, Consumer Welfare, Mixed Logit, Industrial Organization,

Willingness to Pay for Digital Contents in Japan

We estimate a mixed logit demand model for the Japanese digital content market and measure willingness to pay for service attributes. We find that the willingness to pay for an extra unit of service quality ranges from 62 Yen to 83 Yen per month. Meanwhile, the switching cost, a measure of disutility from switching to other service providers is estimated as 340 Yen ($3) per month, which is approximately the same as the current monthly subscription fee.Willingness to Pay, Digital Contents

Integrated control of RTUs and refrigeration equipment in convenience stores

Convenience stores with refrigerated display cases are ubiquitous in much of the developed world. For such buildings it is common to utilize multiple rooftop units (RTU) to serve the retail area and multiple coolers or freezers to provide cooling for merchandise. The overall objective of this paper is to develop and assess an integrated control approach for typical convenience store applications using a virtual testbed. The integrated controls will coordinate the operation of multiple RTUs and refrigeration systems for the purposes of reducing energy consumption and electrical peak demand. For practical implementation, a relatively simple model-based predictive control algorithm is developed and evaluated that requires no additional sensors. Convenience stores are everywhere and opportunities for optimizing controls would be significant

Oligopolistic Agreement and/or Superiority?: New Findings from New Methodologies and Data

The influential Scherer and Ross text (1990, p. 411) states that the main question in empirical industrial organization in the latter part of the twentieth century is Bains (1951) collusion or agreement hypothesis versus Demsetzs (1973) superior firm hypothesis. Prior to the Federal Trade Commission Line-of-Business (LOB) studies the contending schools were deadlocked, but these studies led to a win being declared for the superiority hypothesis by Scherer writing with seven other LOB researchers (1987). These studies found that the effect of concentration on profits disappeared when controlling for firm shares. As many economists agreed, merger policy shifted away from a focus on agreement to applying a unilateral effects (non-cooperative Nash) approach. We develop a nine year panel LOB data set for Korea. We perform three types of tests, all of which support both hypotheses, but which show that the agreement effect overwhelmingly dominates the superiority effect in pricing. First we examine a secondary implication of the superiority model: profit aggregation should imply that if share is negatively related to firm profits, so should concentration be negatively related to industry profits. Instead, we find that for those industries with a negative share relationship, the concentration profits relationship is positive and virtually identical to the relationship for the full sample in both within and between panel tests. Next we introduce a commonly cited model in the empirical literature. This model is cited to motivate the proposition that both share and concentration should have an effect on firm profits. However, authors who cite this model then typically use an ad hoc specification rather than estimating this as a structural model. We develop our structural model and define latent variables to distinguish between domestic and export price cost margins (PCMs) and to identify firm conjectures as they impact the domestic PCM. Demand elasticities are captured in non-linear industry fixed effects. We show that concentration plays an overwhelming role in determining firm PCMs, with firm share playing a far smaller role. We additionally exploit the structural characteristics of the model to deal with the possibility that deviations between marginal costs and average costs might be driving the results. For supporting evidence we construct a new latent variable identifying the domestic/export price ratio. We find a strong within relationship between concentration and the domestic/export price ratio, again firm shares play a weaker role. Finally, we discuss why our results differ from the FTC-LOB studies and provide evidence that would suggest that the FTC studies conclusions are biased due to the 1973 removal of price controls and energy crisis, the stagflation of the 1970s, and the use of national firm shares along with geographically weighted averages of concentration ratios.Industrial Organization,

Internalized Model Minority Myth, Asian Values, and Help-Seeking Attitudes among Asian American Students

The present study examined cultural factors underlying help-seeking attitudes of Asian American college students (N = 106). Specifically, we explored internalized model minority myth as a predictor of help-seeking attitudes and tested an intrapersonal-interpersonal framework of Asian values as a mechanism by which the two are related. Results indicated that internalized model minority myth significantly predicted unfavorable help-seeking attitudes, and emotional self-control mediated this relationship. Interpersonal values and humility were nonsignificant mediators, contrary to our hypotheses. The findings suggest that the investigation of internalized model minority myth in help-seeking research is a worthwhile endeavor, and they also highlight emotional self-control as an important explanatory variable in help-seeking attitudes of Asian American college students