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11:00 | Defense - PhD
Dissertation Committee:
Avner Shaked (chair)
Krešimir Žigić (local chair)
Andreas Ortmann
Abstract:
In this thesis, I explore the particular issues of pricing, product quality selection, and intellectual property rights (IPR) protection in the software market. In the first part of the thesis, I study price discrimination in a monopolistic software market. The monopolist charges different prices for the upgrade version and for the full version. Consumers are heterogeneous in taste for software that is infinitely durable and there is no resale. I show that price discrimination leads to a higher software quality but raises both absolute price and price per quality. This price discrimination decreases the total number of consumers compared to no discrimination. Finally, such discrimination decreases consumers' surplus but increases the developer's profit and social welfare that attains the social optimum in the limit. In the second part of the thesis, I focus on the interaction between a regulator's IPR protection policy against software piracy on the one side and the forms of IPR protection that software producers may themselves undertake to protect their IPR on the other side. Two developers, each offering a variety of different quality, compete for heterogeneous users who choose among purchasing a legal version, using an illegal copy, and not using a product at all. Using an illegal version violates IPR and is thus punishable when disclosed. If a developer considers the level of piracy as high, he can introduce a form of private protection for his product. I examine the above issues within the framework where the quality of each developer's product is exogenously given, and the developers compete in prices.
15:00 | Macro Research Seminar
“The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa”
Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts
Authors: Stelios Michalopoulos and Elias Papaioannou
Abstract: We examine the economic consequences of the partitioning of Africa among European powers in the late 19th century; a process historically known as the scramble for Africa. First, using information on the spatial distribution of African ethnicities before colonization we establish that border drawing was largely arbitrary. Apart from the land mass and water area of an ethnicity’s historical homeland, no other geographic, ecological, historical, and ethnic-specific trait predicts which ethnic groups have been partitioned by the national borders. Second, employing data on the location of civil conflicts after independence we show that compared to ethnicities that have not been impacted by the border design, partitioned ethnic groups have suffered significantly more, longer, and more devastating civil wars. Third, we find that economic development — as reflected by satellite data on light density at night — is systematically lower in the historical homeland of partitioned ethnicities. These results are robust to a rich set of controls at a fine level and the inclusion of country and ethnic-family fixed-effects. Our regressions thus identify a sizable causal negative effect of the scramble for Africa on comparative regional development.
Full Text: “The Long-Run Effects of the Scramble for Africa”
