Tres assajos sobre organització industrial: competència, fixació de preus, regulació
- Autores: Bita Shabgard
- Directores de la Tesis: Ángel López Rodríguez (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2020
- Idioma: español
- ISBN: 9788449098369
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Ramon Faulí Oller (presid.), Amparo Sanchis Llopis (secret.), Raúl Bajo Buenestado (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Economía Aplicada por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
- Resumen
This doctoral dissertation is in the field of industrial organisation and focuses on three markets namely search engine market, banking industry, and card payment market. I use theoretical and empirical approaches to study key issues in these markets such as competition, price setting, and antitrust. In this regard, this doctoral dissertation has three objectives as follows.
The first objective is to study whether and under what circumstances asymmetry between search engines tends to increase or decrease over time and whether increasing dominance with monopolisation is possible. In this regard, I explore and solve a dynamic duopoly investment game for two competing search engines where they simultaneously invest in R&D to improve the quality of search results over time. The results show that under certain conditions, the asymmetry between search engines vanishes over time and the optimal path of quality and R&D investment converge to the steady-state equilibrium. I further find that when discount rate is sufficiently large, the asymmetry between search engines increases over time and the market structure turns from duopoly to monopoly.
Second, I study how Single Euro Payment Area (SEPA) project affects competition among European banks in the retail payment market. To address this question, I explore and solve a model of non-linear price competition between two asymmetric banks in terms of capital by considering price discrimination in pre-SEPA and uniform pricing in post-SEPA under the presence of economies of scale. The results show that the transaction pattern has a vital role in the effects of SEPA on competition between banks. Competition is less intense in post-SEPA when the transaction pattern is domestically oriented. Moreover, comparison of pre- and post-SEPA suggests that SEPA intensifies competition when economies of scale are large enough. I further show that consumer surplus improves in post-SEPA as a result of uniform pricing but the effect of SEPA on welfare depends on the compliance cost with SEPA.
Third, I empirically examine how changes in the interchange fee affect retail prices in Spain. The interchange fee is a payment from the merchant’s bank (called the acquirer) to the cardholder’s bank (called the issuer) per card transaction. This is a fundamental fee that affects the card payment usage by a cardholder and the card acceptance by a merchant. I focus on two sides of the market and study the short- and long-run relationships between the interchange fee and retail prices considering a panel of 10 different merchant sectors in Spain from the first quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of 2019. The results show that in the long-run, retail prices decrease as a result of declining interchange fee as had been expected by antitrust authorities.
