Non-Linear Pricing in Imperfectly Competitive Markets

This thesis is dedicated to the analysis of non-linear pricing in oligopoly. Non-linear pricing is a fairly predominant practice in most real markets, mostly characterized by some amount of competition. The sophistication of pricing practices has increased in the latest decades due to the technological advances that have allowed companies to gather more and more data on consumers preferences. The first essay of the thesis highlights the main characteristics of oligopolistic non-linear pricing. Non-linear pricing is a special case of price discrimination. The theory of price discrimination has to be modified in presence of oligopoly: in particular, a crucial role is played by the competitive externality that implies that product differentiation is closely related to the possibility of discriminating. The essay reviews the theory of competitive non-linear pricing by starting from its foundations, mechanism design under common agency. The different approaches to model non-linear pricing are then reviewed. In particular, the difference between price and quantity competition is highlighted. Finally, the close link between non-linear pricing and the recent developments in the theory of vertical differentiation is explored. The second essay shows how the effects of non-linear pricing are determined by the relationship between the demand and the technological structure of the market. The chapter focuses on a model in which firms supply a homogeneous product in two different sizes. Information about consumers' reservation prices is incomplete and the production technology is characterized by size economies. The model provides insights on the size of the products that one finds in the market. Four equilibrium regions are identified depending on the relative intensity of size economies with respect to consumers' evaluation of the good. Regions for which the product is supplied in a single unit or in several different sizes or in only a very large one. Both the private and social desirability of non-linear pricing varies across different equilibrium regions. The third essay considers the broadband internet market. Non discriminatory issues seem the core of the recent debate on the opportunity or not of regulating the internet. One of the main questions posed is whether the telecom companies, owning the networks constituting the internet, should be allowed to offer quality-contingent contracts to content providers. The aim of this essay is to analyze the issue through a stylized two-sided market model of the web that highlights the effects of such a discrimination over quality, prices and participation to the internet of providers and final users. An overall welfare comparison is proposed, concluding that the final effects of regulation crucially depend on both the technology and preferences of agents.

Essays in nonlinear pricing and rent seeking

This thesis consists of three self-contained essays on nonlinear pricing and rent-seeking. In the first chapter of the thesis, I provide new theoretical insights about non-linear pricing in monopoly and common agency by combining the principal-agent framework with other-regarding preferences. I introduce a new theoretical model that separately characterizes status-seeker and inequity-averse buyers. I show how the buyer’s optimal choice of quality and market inefficiency change when the buyer has other-regarding preferences. In the second chapter, I find the optimal productive rent-seeking and sabotaging efforts when the prize is endogenous. I show that due to the existence of endogeneity, sabotaging the productive rent-seeking efforts causes sabotaging the endogenous part of the prize, which can affect the rent-seeking efforts. Moreover, I introduce social preferences into my model and characterize symmetric productive rent-seeking and sabotaging efforts. In the last chapter, I propose a new theoretical model regarding information disclosure with Bayesian persuasion in rent-seeking contests when the efforts are productive. I show that under one-sided incomplete information, information disclosure decision depends on both the marginal costs of efforts and the marginal benefit of aggregate exerted effort. I find that since the efforts are productive and add a positive surplus on the fixed rent, my model narrows down the conditions for the information disclosure compared to the exogenous model. Under the two-sided incomplete information case, I observe that there is a non-monotone relationship between optimal effort and posterior beliefs. Thus, it might be difficult to conclude whether a contest organizer should disclose any information to contestants.

Essays on asset pricing

The first chapter provides evidence that aggregate Research and Development (R&D) investment drives a persistent component in productivity growth and that this embodies a risk priced in financial markets. In a semi-endogenous growth model, this component is identified by the R&D in excess of equilibrium levels and can be approximated by the Error Correction Term in the cointegration between R&D and Total Factor Productivity. Empirically, the component results being well defined and it satisfies all key theoretical predictions: it exhibits appropriate persistency, it forecasts productivity growth, and it is associated with a cross-sectional risk premium. CAPM is the most foundational model in financial economics, but is known to empirically underestimate expected returns of low-risk assets and overestimate those with high risk. The second chapter studies how risks omission and funding tightness jointly contribute to explaining this anomaly, with the former affecting the definition of assets’ riskiness and the latter affecting how risk is remunerated. Theoretically, the two effects are shown to counteract each other. Empirically, the spread related to binding leverage constraints is found to be significant at 2% yearly. Nonetheless, average returns of portfolios that exploit this anomaly are found to mostly reflect omitted risks, in contrast to their employment in previous literature. The third chapter studies how ‘sustainability’ of assets affect discount rates, which is intrinsically mediated by the risk profile of the assets themselves. This has implications for the assessment of the sustainability-related spread and for hedging changes in the sustainability concern. This mechanism is tested on the ESG-score dimension for US data, with inconclusive evidence regarding the existence of an ESG-related premium in the first place. Also, the risk profile of the long-short ESG portfolio is not likely to impact the sign of its average returns with respect to the sustainability-spread, for the time being.