ESSAYS ON EMPIRICAL INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION

JIEHONG QIU

The first chapter studies how signaling mechanisms can be employed by e-commerce markets to fix the drawbacks of reputation systems. I examine the treatment effects of signaling programs under three scenarios: different signaling costs, different product values and different reputation ratings. The theoretical and empirical findings of the paper indicate the following requirements for an efficient signaling mechanism which can facilitate transactions of new sellers in an e-commerce market: 1. the reputation system of the market can generate reliable customer reviews; 2. the product value is high; 3. the signaling cost is high, especially for low-reputation sellers; and 4. the signaling cost and the status of taking signaling actions are factored in ranking the display order of sellers. The second chapter investigates the effects of transportation infrastructure investment on small peripheral regions when connected to large metropolitan areas. Guided by the theoretical predictions, using large-scale highway network construction in China spanning more than two decades from 1990 to 2012 as a natural experiment, I conduct the difference-in-differences (DID) comparison on the match pairs to infer the causal effects of highway investment on wage and employment growth of a city. I find that small prefecture-level cities that had new highway connections in a year experienced a faster wage growth within two years after the connections. The effect of highway connection on employment growth is in general negative but the effect is not always statistically significant. The last chapter estimates the consumer surplus that Uber brings. I first use NHTS data to identify consumer’s preference in 2008. I then utilize the estimated parameters to revealing passengers’ demand on mode alternatives in 2017. Complete choice set are constructed by combining Uber data and Google map data of 2017. I calculate the consumer surplus by differencing the consumer surplus in the circumstance where Uber is available with the consumer surplus generated under the scenario that Uber is unavailable. I find that Uber bring at least $0.76 gains for each commuter in a trip. The overall consumer surplus that generated by Uber in San Francisco is around $100 million per year.

ESSAYS ON EMPIRICAL INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATION

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