Online Consumer-to-Consumer Communication Networks are characterized by informational and social benefits as well as time and effort costs for participants. Therefore, this dissertation takes an economic perspective on the network formation process as a determinant of value for consumers and...

Mit der Liberalisierung des europäischen Marktes für elektrische Energie haben sich die Randbedingungen für alle in diesem Markt tätigen Unternehmen grundlegend verändert. Um das langfristige Ziel eines europäischen Binnenmarktes zu erreichen, sind erhebliche Eingriffe in die unter...

Diese Doktorarbeit besteht aus vier eigenständigen Forschungsarbeiten, die in der Zeit von Oktober 2004 bis Oktober 2007 geschrieben wurden, während ich Teilnehmer am "Doctoral Programme in Quantitative Economics and Finance" an der Universität Konstanz war. Meine Forschungsinteressen...

Today's predominant disclosure philosophy calls for the fulldisclosure of all decision relevant information bycompanies. More publicly available information, theargument goes, limits the adverse selection problem by reducinginformation asymmetry among heterogeneous investors. Thus, theliquidity...

Die Gründung des GATT Abkommens im Jahr 1947 sowie die Welthandelsorganisation führten zu weltweiten Zollsenkung. Seit deren Gründung haben sich mehr als 150 Länder innerhalb von acht Verhandlungsrunden auf Zollsenkungen von durchschnittlich 40% auf nunmehr 4% geeinigt.Hauptsäule der WTO...

The importance of social and economic networks has meanwhile been widely acknowledged throughout social sciences. Network positions are supposed to be important for both, consumers and suppliers. Examples are R&D collaborations, strategic alliances, knowledge management within organizations,...

While advance booking programs have been shown to be effective for …firms to manage uncertain demand, the effectiveness of such programs is unclear when supply, demand, and price risks are present in a supply chain. Motivated by an advance booking program for managing these three types of...

We investigate the innovation rate under the impact of business cycles to understand R&D activities and to derive implications for public policies. Combining price competition and endogenous market structure with the framework of dynamic game, we study the Markov perfect equilibrium where...

I develop and structurally estimate an equilibrium model of the college market. Students, who are heterogeneous in both abilities and preferences, make college application decisions, subject to uncertainty and application costs. Colleges observe only noisy measures of student ability and set up...

In models with unobserved taste heterogeneity, distributional assumptions can be placed in two ways: (1) by specifying the distribution of coefficients in the utility function and deriving the distribution of willingness to pay (wtp), or (2) by specifying the distribution of wtp and deriving the...