| 主讲人 |
周晓露 |
简介 |
<div>Rebates are a form of vertical contracts used by upstream firms to give downstream firms’ incentives, and/or screen downstream firms who have private information. I investigate these two effects of rebates in a dynamic environment, by focusing a rebate contract employed on a large ecommerce marketplace, Alibaba’s Tmall. On the platform, sellers receive a rebate if their yearly revenue exceed pre-determined thresholds. This generates dynamic incentive for sellers to set lower prices than their profit-maximization depending on the distance to the threshold and time left. It also generates price discrimination effect by screening sellers responding to different thresholds. I construct a model of sellers’ dynamic pricing decisions under rebate incentive taking into account the heterogeneity in sellers’ type. Using the price, revenue and rebate terms data, I estimate a joint distribution and transition of sellers’ type. I use estimates to compare the relative importance of incentive and screening effects. I also do a counterfactual to compare the effectiveness of rebates in a dynamic environment relative to a static environment.</div>
<div> </div> |
| 主讲人简介 |
<div>Dr. Xiaolu Zhou is assistant professor of Economics at the School of Economics, Wangyanan Institution for Economic Studies, Xiamen University. She graduated from the Pennsylvania State University with a Ph.D. degree in Economics in 2017 with emphasis on Industrial Organization and Applied Microeconomics. Before that, she received M.A. in Economics from Peking University, and B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, respectively.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Dr. Zhou’s current research focus on online marketplaces, for example, online buyers’ and sellers’ behaviors in ecommerce marketplaces, online platforms’ reputation system, return policies and platform’s pricing. One of her paper studies the rating system in ecommerce marketplaces. She investigated consumers’ learning behavior from online ratings, and measured the effect on small and unknown sellers’ reputation and the market structure as a whole.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>She also combines the vertical contracts literature with platforms’ pricing. In another paper, she compares different forms of platforms’ pricing, such as, a fixed commission rate, a membership fee, and nonlinear pricing. She focus on the moral hazard and adverse selection problems within the independent sellers, specifically, how platforms’ pricing affects independent sellers’ incentives to internalize the platform’s interests in market expansion, and how platforms’ pricing screen sellers with private information about their own demand and cost.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Besides, Dr. Zhou’s research also lie in computational solution methods of dynamic problems. One of her research paper proposed a new method to solve continuous-choice dynamic problems. Compared to the method of discretizing the action space, the new method improves the accuracy, and can be implemented to cases with multi-dimensional actions.</div> |
期数 |
WISE-SOE双周青年论坛2017秋季学期第三讲（总第81讲） |
