The hotel industry continues embracing loyalty/rewards programs as a major platform to nurture customer relationships as well as reap return business. The reality is that major hotels have been aggressively spending more but achieve less in defending existing customers. We address this void by...

This dissertation aims to contribute to our understanding of dynamic interaction in duopoly markets. Chapter 1 motivates the study and offers a brief overview of the results.In Chapter 2 I study the dynamic equilibrium of a market characterized by repeat purchases. Such markets exhibit two...

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has received considerable research attention over the past several decades, including a growing body of work examining consumer responses to firms’ socially-responsible initiatives. Much of this has been of an experimental design, with CSR narrowly focused...

Switching costs has been recognised as a primary reason why dissatisfied customers stay with their suppliers. While a validated multidimensional scale of switching costs exists in a business-to-consumer context, there has been little empirical research effort devoted to operationalising...

Economics is a complex system that requires different approaches for analysis. I analyzed switching costs and network effects together with a new simulation approach to modeling systems composed of autonomous and interacting agents. Agent based computational economics is one of the simulation...

This paper proposes a practical method for estimating consumer lock-in effects from firm-level data. The method compares the behavior of already contracted consumers to the behavior of new consumers, the latter serving as a counterfactual to the former. In panel regressions on firms’ incoming...

This monograph surveys the effects of long-run relationships in banking between corporate borrowers and lenders. The first part of the survey analyzes econometric issues in the measurement of the costs and benefits of such relationships. In particular, we analyze potential issues with commonly...

Many economists and policy analysts seem to believe that loyaltyrewarding pricing schemes, like frequent flyer programs, tend to reinforce firm's market power and hence are detrimental to consumer welfare. The existing academic literature has supported this view to some extent. In contrast, we...

In this article I analyze the effects of a recent reform intended to decrease switching costs in the cellular industry. The reform, implemented in Chile in 2012, allowed cell phone users to switch operators without any contract restriction while keeping their wireless number. Its aim was the...