题 目：: Price signaling in monopolistic competition(垄断竞争中的价格信号)
时 间：2019年12月12日（周四）10：30~12：00
地 点：8797威尼斯老品牌303会议室
主讲人： Xiangting Hu
组织人：胡涛、吴泽南、石凡奇、汪浩、胡岠
摘 要： This paper studies the price-signaling effects in a market of monopolistic competition, in which a search friction allows each firm to maintain significant market power when its impact on the rivals is negligible. Firm's products are both horizontally and vertically differentiated. A consumer incurs search costs to visit a firm to obtain the price and the product information, and the vertical-quality information is not perfectly observed by a consumer even upon visiting. We show that there exists a separating equilibrium that satisfies the Cho-Kreps intuitive criterion. In the equilibrium, the high-quality firm distorts the price upwards such that the price is higher than the complete-information case. The better the market transparency is, the lower the equilibrium prices are. In addition, when products are sufficiently differentiated in the horizontal dimension, a decrease in search cost lowers all firms' prices. However, if the products are not sufficiently horizontally differentiated, then a decrease in search cost can raise the price of the high-quality product while lower the price of the low-quality product, generating a greater price dispersion.
主讲人介绍： Xiangting Hu is an associate professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Management, at the Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. She obtained a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research fields are industrial organization, education, and family economics. Her papers have been published in International Journal of Industrial Organization, Demography, Journal of Economics, Economic Modelling, Economic Research Journal, etc.
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