| Research on consumer’ s behaviours and choices is an important part in industrial organization.Usually,equilibrium price and quantities of various products can be observed on market level,which could be regarded as the results of consumer’ s choices and seller’ s strategy decisions.But for government departments and enterprises,it is far from enough to learn products’ information about price and sale only on market level.In fact,relevant departments need to completely understand markets in order to regulate industry and make efficient policy.And companies,especially those in intense competition,must consider their competitors’ strategies and consumers’ demand before making their own decisions.Consumer demand,as one side in supply-demand relation,is drawing increasing attention.And consumer’ s choices on products,which aggregate into demand,are mentioned frequently by governments and enterprises.For example,how a new policy or other shocks would change individuals’ purchase decisions? At present,the research on consumer preference and behaviour is still in a limited amount in China.But,with the rapid development of economy and increase of individual income,more studies are attaching importance to consumer behaviour from micro aspect.Real estate industry and automobile industry are two important industries in China.Using the structural model in IO framework,this dissertation models consumer’ s behaviours in markets and explores the influences of different shocks on consumer’ s choice in housing market and passenger car market,respectively.Specifically,combined the market features,different models are established about consumer’ s purchase decisions in these two markets.Then through estimation,this thesis explores the home purchase restriction(HPR)issued by the State Council on February 11 th,2011 and consumer boycott to Japanese vehicles in September 2012,respectively.The dissertation is organized as follows.In chapter 2,first,I provide some background information about the introduction of HPR.In particular,I describe the rapid development of real estate market around 2011 when the HPR is proposed and possible reasons for soaring housing price.Also,since estimation is based on the data in Beijing,the policy details in Beijing are illustrated.Then,I briefly introduce the passenger car market structure and the practical conditions for consumer boycott to occur.Based on the background information of HPR and the consumer boycott in chapter2,research on these two subjects is arranged in chapter 3 and 4,respectively.In chapter3,following Berry(1994)I establish a nested-logit random utility model for consumer’s choices in real estate market,and the nest is defined in terms of administrative districts.Consumers are assumed to decide the administrative districts that they would like to purchase homes first and then make final choices in that area.Meanwhile,a profit maximum model is established for enterprises and assume that they compete with each other by playing a Bertrand pricing game.Based on the transaction data between the first quarter,2009 and the first quarter,2017 in Beijing,the demand and supply function are estimated simultaneously.In particular,following Berry and Jia(2010)a comparative static analysis approach is used.Thus the supply-demand system is estimated before and after the HPR policy,respectively.In addition,I also conduct three counterfactual simulations in order to quantify the HPR efficiency.The results denote that after the cooling intervention consumers become less elastic to price,that is,investment,which is related to large price elasticity,is significantly removed away from housing market and households purchase homes mainly for consumption.The change proves that HPR is efficient in restraining speculative purchase.Further,the counterfactual analysis denotes that this intervention has influences on real estate developers as well even though it aims to affect consumers directly.Also,compared with current HPR that restrains purchase eligibility by Hukou state,a random restraint approach is more efficient in terms of social welfare.Chapter 4 explores the consumer boycott to Japanese vehicles with a random coefficient logit model(see Berry et al.,1995).As that in chapter 3,comparative static analysis approach is introduced.Particularly,according to the conclusion about boycott phases in this event in Hu(2018),the transaction data in passenger car market between 2011 and 2014 is divided into three periods,that is pre-,peri-and post-boycott period.Then I estimate consumer’ s utility function in each period.However,differing from previous estimation,this paper adopts a new nonparametric estimation approach following Lu et al.(2016),which transforms the nonlinear estimate part in this model into a linear form and makes the estimate process time-saving.The results focus on consumer preference and willingness-to-pay(WTP)to Japanese cars as well as Japanese vehicle manufacturer’s market share and profit.It denotes that from pre-to peri-boycott period,consumer prefer less Japanese vehicles and the WTPs to the top three Japanese brands decline significantly.In addition,through counterfactual simulation,I estimate the influences on Japanese auto manufacturers if another similar event happens in future.The preliminary results show that in a more fiercely competitive situation,boycott would cause Japanese vehicles suffer seriously,especially for those brands that account for large market shares previously.This dissertation contributes in the following several ways.First,study the HPR from a new aspect.This cooling policy was introduced suddenly in 2011 and attracted wide attention.However,being different from previous research that mainly focus on the relation among housing price,sales volume,financial risks,etc.on market level,a theoretical model for consumer’ s behaviours is introduced in this dissertation,providing an intermediate channel through which the measure plays a role.Also,on basic estimation,the paper estimates the social welfares in HPR and counterfactual situations,which examines the policy efficiency quantitatively.Then,this paper presents a comparison about the efficiency between current cooling intervention and random restraint approach.Due to the limit of data availability,this new approach is quite preliminary.But it still provides some meaningful information for further work.In addition,the research on boycotting Japanese vehicles in Chinese passenger car market adds to the empirical study about consumer boycott.Specifically,by estimating consumer preference,this paper explores how the boycott leads to reduction in sales rather than only examining boycott’ s efficiency on market level.Also,since boycott frequency in China is increasing in recent years.Studying the changes in consumer preference and WTP in this boycott could provide useful information for companies in automobile market or even other markets to deal with similar events appropriately. |
