EconStor Collection:
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/279
2024-03-28T15:53:51ZIndustry structure, segmentation and competition in the U.S. hotel industry
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/274039
Title: Industry structure, segmentation and competition in the U.S. hotel industry
Authors: Butters, R. Andrew; Hubbard, Thomas N.
Abstract: This paper investigates how increases in concentration can be interrupted or reversed by changes in how firms compete on quality. We examine the U.S. hotel industry during the past half century. We document that starting in the early 1980s, quality competition came more in the form of costs that vary with hotel size, and less in the form of costs that are fixed with hotel size, particularly for business travelers. We then show that, consistent with Sutton (1991), industry structure has evolved differently since then in areas that are business travel versus personal travel destinations. Demand increases have been associated with more, but smaller, hotels in business travel destinations. In contrast, the growth in the number of hotels is much smaller, and the growth in average hotel size is much greater, in personal travel destinations. We provide evidence that this change reflects the emergence of two new classes of hotels - limited service and all-suites hotels - that did not exist before the early 1980s. These entrants - many of which had high quality rooms but which had limited out-of-room amenities - had a narrower competitive impact on other hotels than did the entrants of the 1960s and 1970s, which competed more on out-of-the-room amenities, and this led the industry structure to evolve differently.2020-01-01T00:00:00ZCan society function without ethical agents? An informational perspective
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/274038
Title: Can society function without ethical agents? An informational perspective
Authors: Strulovici, Bruno
Abstract: Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is cheap to manipulate, produced sequentially, and these individuals are devoid of ethical motive. The answer depends on an "information attrition" condition pertaining to the amount of evidence available which distinguishes, for example, between reproducible scientific evidence and the evidence generated in a crime. Applications to institution enforcement, social cohesion, scientific progress, and historical revisionism are discussed.2020-01-01T00:00:00ZSpiraling or self-correcting discrimination: A multi-armed bandit approach
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/274040
Title: Spiraling or self-correcting discrimination: A multi-armed bandit approach
Authors: Bardhi, Arjada; Guo, Yingni; Strulovici, Bruno
Abstract: Can workers from social groups of comparable productivities obtain comparable employment opportunities in the long run? We model dynamic hiring and employer learning via a general Poisson multi-armed bandit framework. Breakdown environments that reveal on-the-job mistakes rather than successes give a large advantage to marginally more productive groups. Breakthrough environments, in contrast, guarantee comparable payoffs to comparable groups. This insight is robust to various sources of across-groups heterogeneity, belief misspecification by employers, and varying degrees of labor demand scarcity. Equal access to productivity investment only enhances prior differences across groups.2019-01-01T00:00:00ZReputation building with endogenous speed of learning
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/274037
Title: Reputation building with endogenous speed of learning
Authors: Pei, Harry
Abstract: I study reputation models in which information about the long-run player's past behavior is dispersed among short-run players. I identify two challenges to reputation building when such information is aggregated via the short-run players' actions. First, when the long-run player's action can only affect short-run players' future behaviors, the informativeness of short-run players' actions decreases when the long-run player becomes more patient. This leads to equilibria in which both players receive low payoffs. Second, when each short-run player can also observe an informative signal about the long-run player's current period action, I propose a resistent to learning condition under which reputation fails. This is because the short-run player's action can be uninformative about the long-run player's type in periods where the latter receives a low payoff. When the environment is not resistent to learning, the patient long-run player can secure his commitment payoff in all equilibria.2019-01-01T00:00:00Z