Contributions published at Entrepreneurship (Ulrich Kaiser)

In markets with thousands of products, firms cannot take it for granted that consumers are even aware of their articles’ existence. Advertising and actions to attract consumer attention are therefore integral components of a firm’s competitive toolbox. We study firms’ behavior in a perfect example for such a market: The music industry, in which consumers can choose from a plethora of albums and songs. We study a specific strategic instrument of firms, single releases, applying unique micro-level data. Arguing that the digitization of the industry via MP3, filesharing, and iTunes amounts to forced unbundling, the role of singles has changed from individual revenue generators (pre-digital era) to pure attention gatherers. In accordance with this driving hypothesis, we observe an inverse U-shaped relationship between competition intensity and the number of singles released in the digital era, while previously competition had a purely negative effect.

The career concerns literature predicts that incentives for effort decline as beliefs about ability become more precise (Holmstrom, 1982/1999). In contrast, we show that effort can increase with belief precision when agents compete for promotions to better paid jobs that are assigned on the basis of perceived abilities. In this case, an intermediate level of precision provides the strongest incentive for effort, with effort increasing (decreasing) when beliefs are less (more) precise.

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The YouTube platform reduces fixed entry costs for local artists but also lowers the cost of access to international superstars. The net effect is an empirical question. We study the effect of YouTube on the market for music, focusing on converging tastes for international hits. We consider Austria and Germany, which share a common culture and technological development but differ in access to music videos on YouTube. Exploiting a contract dispute that has blocked official music videos in Germany since 2009, we find that YouTube increases the number of US hits on European charts. We further find evidence that YouTube speeds the hit-making cycle and brings more unique titles to top charts. Although the superstar effect dominates, the magnitude of estimated effects are modest, suggesting that YouTube will not drive out the market for local music.

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It is difficult to empirically test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit efforts incentives because researchers cannot randomly "assign" career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face different external career opportunities depending on their nationality. We test whether the career prospect of being selected to a Euro Cup national team affects players' pre-Cup performances, using nationals of countries that did not participate in the Euro Cup as a control group. We find that the Euro Cup career prospect has positive effects on the performances of players with intermediate chances of being selected to their national team, but negative effects on the performances of players whose selection is very probable. Our findings have implications for the incentive effects of within-firm promotions and of external career opportunities.

Motivated by Manski and Tamer (2002) and especially their partial identification analysis of the regression model where one covariate is only interval-measured, we present two extensions. Manski and Tamer (2002) propose two estimation approaches in this context, focussing on general results. The modified minimum distance (MMD) estimates the true identified set and the modified method of moments (MMM) a superset. Our first contribution is to characterize the true identified set and the superset. Second, we complete and extend the Monte Carlo study of Manski and Tamer (2002). We present benchmark results using the exact functional form for the expectation of the dependent variable conditional on observables to compare with results using its nonparametric estimate, and illustrate the superiority of MMD over MMM.

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This paper examines how the ability of traditional media firms to engage in targeted advertising has changed 1 with the advent of the Internet. We find that the premium for reaching a homogeneous audience increases for magazines that have a companion website, as well as for those whose readers are more likely to be online. This indicates a complementarity between offline and online channels with respect to targeted advertising. We hypothesize that this result is driven by multihoming consumers who enhance the value of targeted advertising, in contrast to the usual assumption that multiple advertising messages are redundant

Reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools. Under these regimes, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between a drug's pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government. Reference prices are either externally (based on drug prices in other countries) or internally (based on domestic drug prices) determined. We study the effects of a change from external to internal reference pricing in Denmark in 2005. We find that the reform led to substantial reductions in retail prices, reference prices and patient co-payments as well as to sizable decreases in overall producer revenues and health care expenditures. The reform induced consumers to substitute away from branded drugs for which we estimate strong preferences. The increase in consumer welfare due to the reform therefore depends on whether or not we take perceived quality differences into account in its calculation.

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Reference price systems for prescription drugs constitute widely adopted cost containment tools. In these systems, patients co-pay a fraction of the difference between a drug's pharmacy retail price and a reference price that is set by the government. Reference prices are either determined externally (based on drug prices in other countries) or internally (based on domestic drug prices). We study the effects of a change from external to internal reference pricing in Denmark in 2005. The reform led to substantial reductions in retail prices, reference prices and consumer co-payments as well as to sizable decreases in overall producer revenues and health care expenditures. The reform induced consumers to substitute away from branded drugs for which we estimate strong preferences. Therefore, as long as we include the perceived differences between branded and generic drugs in our consumer welfare estimation, the increase in consumer welfare due to the reform is relatively small.