ESSAYS ON THE ECONOMICS OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING AND CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION

Abstract

The three chapters of this thesis are motivated by research questions facilitated by technological advancements. The first chapter considers a theoretical framework to examine the optimal channel strategy of luxury brands in the presence of online marketplace and non-deceptive consumption of counterfeits. The second chapter examines the consequence of open access on journal quality by incorporating competitive bottleneck and allowing for endogenous asymmetric competition. The last chapter updates citation-based rankings of academic journals in economics to reflect the recent introduction of a few new society journals. We document that all the new society journals (AEJ-Applied Economics, AEJ-Macroeconomics, AEJ-Microeconomics and AEJ-Economic Policy, QE and TE) dominate their respective fields, and further explore different mechanisms that could explain the rapid rise of the new society journals. As all chapters draw on the economics of platforms and underlie the dimension of vertical differentiation, they are inherently connected and therefore coherent as a dissertation.