scholarly journals Price Discrimination and Bargaining: Empirical Evidence from Medical Devices

2013 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Grennan
Keyword(s):  
Panel Data ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Price Discrimination ◽  
Medical Devices ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Hospital Costs ◽  
Business Markets ◽  
Uniform Pricing ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
Business To Business

Many important issues in business-to-business markets involve price discrimination and negotiated prices, situations where theoretical predictions are ambiguous. This paper uses new panel data on buyer-supplier transfers and a structural model to empirically analyze bargaining and price discrimination in a medical device market. While many phenomena that restrict different prices to different buyers are suggested as ways to decrease hospital costs (e.g., mergers, group purchasing organizations, and transparency), I find that: (i) more uniform pricing works against hospitals by softening competition; and (ii) results depend ultimately on a previously unexplored bargaining effect. (JEL C78, L13, L14, L64)

scholarly journals Managing Market Thickness in Online Business-to-Business Markets

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (12) ◽  
pp. 5783-5822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kostas Bimpikis ◽  
Wedad J. Elmaghraby ◽  
Ken Moon ◽  
Wenchang Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Operations Management ◽  
Natural Experiment ◽  
Recommendation System ◽  
Structural Model ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Supply Side ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Business Markets ◽  
Online Business ◽  
Business To Business

We explore marketplace design in the context of a business-to-business platform specializing in liquidation auctions. Even when the platform’s aggregate levels of supply and demand remain fixed, we establish that the platform’s ability to use its design levers to manage the availability of supply over time yields significant value. We study two such levers, each using the platform’s availability of supply as a means to incentivize participation from buyers who decide strategically when/how often to participate. First, the platform’s listing policy sets the ending times of incoming auctions (hence, the frequency of market clearing). Exploiting a natural experiment, we illustrate that consolidating auctions’ ending times to certain weekdays increases the platform’s revenues by 7.3% mainly by inducing a higher level of bidder participation. The second lever is a recommendation system that can be used to reveal information about real-time market thickness to potential bidders. The optimization of these levers highlights a novel trade-off. Namely, when the platform consolidates auctions’ ending times, more bidders may participate in the marketplace (demand-side competition); but ultimately auctions for substitutable goods cannibalize one another (supply-side competition). To optimize these design decisions, we estimate a structural model that endogenizes bidders’ dynamic behavior, that is, their decisions on whether/how often to participate in the marketplace and how much to bid. We find that appropriately designing a recommendation system yields an additional revenue increase (on top of the benefits obtained by optimizing the platform’s listing policy) by reducing supply-side cannibalization and altering the composition of participating bidders. This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.

scholarly journals An economic analysis of ransomware and its welfare consequences

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 190023
Author(s):  
J. Hernandez-Castro ◽  
A. Cartwright ◽  
E. Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Economic Analysis ◽  
Price Discrimination ◽  
Proof Of Concept ◽  
Welfare Costs ◽  
Pilot Survey ◽  
Uniform Pricing ◽  
The Future ◽  
Welfare Consequences ◽  
New Form

We present in this work an economic analysis of ransomware, a relatively new form of cyber-enabled extortion. We look at how the illegal gains of the criminals will depend on the strategies they use, examining uniform pricing and price discrimination. We also explore the welfare costs to society of such strategies. In addition, we present the results of a pilot survey which demonstrate proof of concept in evaluating the costs of ransomware attacks. We discuss at each stage whether the different strategies we analyse have been encountered already in existing malware, and the likelihood of them being implemented in the future. We hope this work will provide some useful insights for predicting how ransomware may evolve in the future.

scholarly journals Diversity–disturbance relationships: frequency and intensity interact

2012 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 768-771 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex R. Hall ◽  
Adam D. Miller ◽  
Helen C. Leggett ◽  
Stephen H. Roxburgh ◽  
Angus Buckling ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Species Diversity ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Ecological Theory ◽  
Intermediate Disturbance Hypothesis ◽  
Intermediate Disturbance ◽  
Disturbance Frequency ◽  
Theoretical Predictions ◽  
Experimental Populations ◽  
Disturbance Hypothesis

An influential ecological theory, the intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH), predicts that intermediate levels of disturbance will maximize species diversity. Empirical studies, however, have described a wide variety of diversity–disturbance relationships (DDRs). Using experimental populations of microbes, we show that the form of the DDR depends on an interaction between disturbance frequency and intensity. We find that diversity shows a monotonically increasing, unimodal or flat relationship with disturbance, depending on the values of the disturbance aspects considered. These results confirm recent theoretical predictions, and potentially reconcile the conflicting body of empirical evidence on DDRs.

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