Calendrier du 01 décembre 2014
Roy Seminar (ADRES)
Du 01/12/2014 de 17:00 à 18:15
MSE (106-112, boulevard de l'Hôpital - Salle du 6ème étage) 75013 PARIS
GALEOTTI Andrea (ESSEX)
Information on consumption’s externalities, monopoly pricing and consumers’ surplus
The increase in the information that firms can obtain about the interactions and influences of their consumers motivates two important questions: How does the pricing strategy of a firm reacts to detailed information on consumers' externalities? Is the availability and use of such information beneficial or detrimental for consumer welfare? We study these questions in a model where a monopoly sells a network good and may price discriminate using information on consumers' influences and/or on consumers' susceptibilities to influence. Our framework incorporates a rich set of market products, including goods characterized by global and local network effects. The optimal pricing takes a simple form, which entails a price discount for the influence of consumers and a price premium for their susceptibility; both of these components are a function of the pattern of externalities across consumers. We can determine under which conditions, relative to uniform price, consumer surplus increases. We provide a full characterization of the value of network information for the monopolist.
GSIELM (Graduate Students International Economics and Labor Market) Lunch Seminar
Du 01/12/2014 de 12:00 à 13:00
MSE Room S17
BEESTERMOELLER Matthias (LUDWIG-MAXIMILIANS-UNIVERSITY MUNICH)
A Dissection of Trading Capital: Cultural persistence of trade in the aftermath of the fall of the Iron Curtain
We show that the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy trade significantly more with one another in the aftermath of the collapse of the Iron Curtain than predicted by a standard gravity model. This trade surplus declines linearly and monotonically over time. We argue that these findings suggest that decaying cultural forces explain a significant part of trading capital. We document the rate of decay of these cultural forces.