Collaborative Research: Estimation and computation of dynamic oligopoly and network effects models

该项目调查新耐用品的消费电子产品市场，如DVD播放机、数码摄像机和数码相机。这些市场的消费者经常因为预期未来的价格下降和质量提高而推迟购买，而公司的定价策略通常建立在知道这种行为存在的基础上。我们研究这些市场的不同重要特征，以评估它们对经济表现和政策的影响。首先，我们考察了我们通常在这些市场中观察到的价格大幅下跌的来源。聚焦于数码摄像机和数码相机市场，我们试图确定这些下降在多大程度上是由于供应商的战略定价、新竞争对手的进入以及外部成本下降所致。我们通过估计成本的决定因素，并使用估计来计算反事实环境下的定价行为，例如随着时间的推移稳定的产品组合，来执行这种分析。其次，我们研究了互补商品市场是如何演变并产生网络效应的。我们对DVD市场的成功特别感兴趣，这需要生产和销售DVD播放机和DVD标题。我们确定了DVD标题对DVD标准的主导地位的贡献，解决了几个在相关先前文献中没有得到很好解决的计量经济学问题。我们的结果涉及到对这些市场的反垄断和监管政策，相关价格指数的构建，以及营销和管理中的相关问题。我们的研究也适用于其他估计动态需求系统、研究耐用品市场或研究寡头垄断相互作用的研究人员。求解消费者需求和寡头垄断供应的动态模型是复杂的，因此，我们的求解方法是新的和计算密集型的，并且是研究人员和分析师独立感兴趣的。与我们过去的项目一样，我们将涉及大量的研究生和本科生，培训他们在应用建模、数值技术和并行计算机使用方面的培训，以及更广泛的良好研究实践。

This project investigates consumer electronics markets for new durable goods such as DVD players, digital camcorders and digital cameras. Consumers in these markets often delay purchases in anticipation of future price decreases and quality increases while firms typically base their pricing strategies on the knowledge that this behavior exists. We study different important features of these markets to evaluate their implications for economic performance and policy. First, we examine the sources of the dramatic price declines that we typically observe in these markets. Focusing on digital camcorder and digital camera markets, we seek to determine the extent to which these declines are due to strategic pricing by suppliers, entry by new competitors, and exogenous cost declines. We perform this analysis by estimating the determinants of cost and using the estimates to compute pricing behavior under counterfactual environments such as a stable product mix over time. Second, we study how complementary goods markets evolve and create network effects. We are particularly interested in the success of the DVD market, which required production and sales of both DVD players and DVD titles. We identify the contribution of DVD titles to the dominance of the DVD standard, solving several econometric issues that have not been well-addressed in the relevant previous literature. Our results bear on antitrust and regulatory policy towards these markets, the construction of relevant price indices, and related issues in marketing and management. Our research is also relevant for other researchers who estimate dynamic demand systems, study durable goods markets or study oligopoly interactions. Solving dynamic models of consumer demand and oligopoly supply is complex and, as a result, our solution methods are new and computationally intensive, and are of independent interest to researchers and analysts. As with our past projects, we will involve a large number of graduate and undergraduate students, training them in applied modeling, numerical techniques and parallel computer use, as well as more generally in good research practices.