The OMDS/VGSE Vienna Joint Economics seminar is held weekly on Thursdays during the term.
VJE-Seminars scheduled in March:
- Speaker: Patrick Rey (Toulouse School of Economics)
- Title: Platform Competition and App Development
- Time: Thursday, March 20, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12, OMP-1
- Abstract: We study the development of apps on competing platforms. We show that competition leads to commissions exceeding those maximizing consumer surplus (and, a fortiori, social welfare) whenever raising one commission reduces rival’s app bases. We relate this finding to economies of scope in app development and, to illustrate it, consider a setting in which some developers can port their apps at no cost: as their proportion increases, app development is progressively choked-o. Fostering platform competition or interoperability may therefore fail to produce the desired results. Within-platform app store competition, together with appropriate access conditions, may constitute a more promising avenue.
- Speaker: Nina Buchmann (Yale University)
- Title: Paternalistic Discrimination
- Time: Thursday, March 6, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12, OMP-1
- Abstract: We combine two field experiments in Bangladesh with a structural labor model to identify paternalistic discrimination, the differential treatment of two groups to protect one group, even against its will, from harmful or unpleasant situations. We observe hiring and application decisions for a night-shift job that provides worker transport at the end of the shift. In the first experiment, we use information about the transport to vary employers' perceptions of job costs to female workers while holding taste-based and statistical discrimination constant: Not informing employers about the transport decreases demand for female labor by 21%. Employers respond more to transport information than cash payments to female workers that enable workers to purchase transport themselves. In the second experiment, not informing applicants about the transport reduces female labor supply by 15%. In structural simulations, paternalistic discrimination has a larger effect on gender employment and wage gaps than taste-based and statistical discrimination.
- Speaker: Zeno Enders (University of Heidelberg)
- Title: The Experience Formation Mechanism (joint work with Christian Conrad and Alexander Glas)
- Time: Thursday, March 13, 1:15 – 2:45 pm
- Location: Lecture Hall 12, OMP-1
- Abstract: We show that inflation expectations of households do not depend on experienced inflation directly; they are rather influenced by remembered inflation. This makes a difference as remembered and actually experienced inflation generally differ. We therefore investigate how inflation experiences are formed and what they depend on. Our main findings are: (i) On average, households overestimate lifetime inflation. (ii) While higher remembered lifetime inflation leads to higher expectations of future inflation rates, there is no such effect for actually experienced inflation. (iii) Negative emotions associated with inflation increase the upward bias of inflation memories, while higher actual inflation rates reduce it. We derive at theoretical model that accounts for the empirical evidence.
