Kazakhstan?s agricultural sector plays an important role in the country'seconomy. Not only does it function as an economic output producer, it alsoserves as a social buffer in times of transition to a market economy. Therestructuring process had a strong impact on the economic performance...

Apples constitute the bulk of deciduous fruit produced in South Africa, i.e. in 2000, apples made up the largest percentage of the deciduous fruit crop (43%). From 991/92 to 2002/03 production averaged 574 850 tons per annum with a standard deviation of 43 922 tons. The average distribution of...

The current marketing of agricultural products in general, and of bananas in particular, poses special problems for Eritrean farmers. Poor climatic conditions coupled with crude and inefficient agricultural technologies render agricultural output sub-optimal. The major production problems...

In the first paper, using a dataset of the records of Texas Real Estate Agents, I reexamine the findings of Hsieh and Moretti (2003) regarding the inefficiency of free entry in real estate industry: first, I point out one important source of misidentification in that paper's analysis of the...

The thesis is a collection of three essays on retail competition that are relevant to both the theory and practice of marketing. Essay 1, examines the role of price and category assortment on competition between EDLP (Every Day Low Price) format and HILO (Promotion) format retail stores. Policy...

This is an industrial organization study of the Indian IT industry. It specifically examines the software and IT services sectors. There will be limited focus on the domestic IT industry and on the hardware sector. This is because the industry is export focused, and also because the hardware...

Central to the explosive growth of the Internet has been the desire of dispersed buyers and sellers to interact readily and in a manner hitherto impossible. Underpinning these interactions, auction pricing mechanisms have enabled Internet transactions in novel ways. Despite this massive...

In this thesis, we analyze the impact of the decentralization of price and leadtime decisions made by the marketing and production departments, respectively, in a make-to-order firm. We first study a monopoly environment, and find that in the decentralized setting, the total demand generated is...

This thesis consists of three papers. Industries that motivated this analysis range are exclusive clubs (Chapter 1) and pharmaceuticals (Chapters 2 and 3). A common thread is the study of the strategic behavior of monopoly or monopoly-like firms and the implications of such behavior.Chapter 1...