Andrew Sweeting's Research Page


Accepted and Published Papers

"Coordination, Differentiation and the Timing of Radio Commercials", Journal of Economics and Management Strategy, 15(4), Winter 2006

"Market Power in the England and Wales Wholesale Electricity Market 1995-2000", The Economic Journal, 117(520), April 2007

"The Strategic Timing of Radio Commercials: An Empirical Analysis Using Multiple Equilibria", RAND Journal of Economics, 40(4), Winter 2009

"The Effects of Mergers on Product Positioning:  Evidence from the Music Radio Industry", RAND Journal of Economics, 41(2), Summer 2010
Contains many results from earlier working papers ("Too Much Rock and Roll?" and "Music Variety, Station Listenership,...").

Papers Currently Under Review or Revision

"Dynamic Product Positioning in Differentiated Product Industries: The Effect of Fees for Musical Performance Rights on the Commercial Radio Industry", January 2011, second revision requested by Econometrica (July 2011)

"Price Dynamics in Perishable Goods Markets: The Case of Secondary Markets for Major League Baseball Tickets", Jan 2012, resubmitted to Journal of Political Economy
earlier version of interest: May 2009, containing analysis of BIN auction and consumer risk aversion; Feb 2010
see extended discussion of this research below

"Competition versus Auction Design", July 2011, with James Roberts, submitted
earlier version of interest: December 2010

"When Should Sellers Use Auctions?", June 2011, with James Roberts, revision requirest by American Economic Review (October 2011)

On-going Projects
Please ask if you want more details about these projects.

“Potential Competition and Merger Policy”, with James Roberts, summary from an NSF Proposal available here

"Selective Entry and Public Procurement", with James Roberts and Vivek Bhattacharya, extends selective entry analysis to low-bid procurement auctions

“Competition and Dynamic Revenue Management in a Perishable Goods Market”, with Chung-Ying Lee and James Roberts

“Retail Mergers, Scale Economics and Product Assortment”, with Carl Mela (Fuqua Marketing), Paul Ellickson (Rochester) and Yair Taylor

"Dynamic Mechanism Choice in Perishable Goods Markets"


Research on Price Dynamics and Mechanism Design in Perishable Goods Markets

Supported by NSF Grant SES 0850441

This area of research examines the behavior and design of markets for 'perishable goods', defined as goods that lose their value at some fixed point in the future (examples include event or airline tickets and seasonal products).  It also uses the setting of perishable goods, which provide intertemporal variation in buyers' and sellers' incentives, to understand phenomena that exist across many other types of markets. 

The research covers three distinct projects:

(1) understanding price dynamics: this project uses new data from secondary markets for event tickets to examine and explain price dynamics in perishable goods markets, in particular testing whether sellers' pricing behavior is consistent with theoretical models of revenue management (Talluri and van Ryzin, 2004).  Revenue management models have been widely used to guide the pricing and capacity decisions of companies in many industries.  For example, Robert Crandall, the former head of American Airlines, regarded revenue management as “single most important technical development in transportation management since we entered the era of airline deregulation in 1979”, but there has been almost no research in economics aimed at understanding the empiricial relevance of revenue management models (McAfee and te Velde, 2006). The paper also considers the extent of strategic consumer behavior in these markets.  A paper (which is under revision for the Journal of Political Economy) is available here: 
"Price Dynamics in Perishable Goods Markets: The Case of Secondary Markets for Major League Baseball Tickets"
 
(2) optimal pricing behavior and competition: most of the revenue management literature assumes that there is a single monopoly seller.  This is rarely true in practice, as different sellers compete to offer similar products.  With competition, sellers are likely incentivized to price in ways that may impact their competitors' future prices.  This project uses new data from secondary markets for event tickets to estimate an innovative continuous time model of demand and seller interaction, which allows us to understand how competitive interactions affect a seller's optimal pricing policy.  I use data on event tickets partly because data is available but also because dynamic pricing between large competing sellers is now an important phenomena in these markets as event promoters and their ticketing partners begin to use dynamic pricing to compete with secondary market brokers.  For example, LiveNation has described introducing dynamic pricing as a key element in its strategy.  The modeling framework developed by this project is also being used in work understanding how competitive dynamic pricing affects pricing outcomes for non-perishable products.
  
(3) market design (auctions vs. fixed prices): very simple economic models suggest that sellers should typically prefer to use auctions rather than fixed prices.  However, fixed prices are widely used throughout the economy, and they are even becoming the most common form of pricing on eBay where it is straightforward for sellers to use auctions.  It is important for market designers to understand what makes fixed prices so popular.  This project seeks to understand sellers' choices of sales mechanism in the secondary market for perishable event tickets.  While perishable goods markets are important in their own right, they also provide an ideal environment for studying sellers’ incentives about which mechanism to use as we can observe individual sellers switching between using fixed prices and auctions depending on the remaining life of the product.