Author: John Lazarev

Publisher:

Published: 2012

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

The dissertation consists of two essays on different aspects of dynamic pricing with applications to the U.S. airline industry. The first essay studies how a firm's ability to price discriminate over time affects production, product quality, and product allocation among consumers. The theoretical model has forward-looking heterogeneous consumers who face a monopoly firm. I use this model to study the time paths of prices for airline tickets offered on monopoly routes in the U.S. Using estimates of the model's demand and cost parameters, I compare the welfare travelers receive under the current system to several alternative systems, including one in which free resale of airline tickets is allowed. The second essay, motivated by pricing practices in the airline industry, studies the incentives of players to publicly and independently limit the sets of actions they play later in a game. I find that to benefit from self-restraint, players have to exclude all actions that create deviations for them and keep some actions that can deter deviations of others. I develop a set of conditions under which these strategies form a subgame perfect equilibrium and show that in a Bertrand oligopoly, firms can mutually gain from self-restraint, while in a Cournot oligopoly they cannot.