讲座人：周晓露（厦门大学）
讲座题目：Dynamic Incentive and Price Discrimination of Rebates: A Study of Alibaba’s Tmall
讲座时间：2017年12月13日(周三)，10:00-11:30
讲座地点：理科大楼A 1712会议室（中北校区）法商楼516（闵行校区）
论文提要：Rebate contract is a form of vertical contract used by upstream firms to give incentive, and/or price discriminate downstream firms who have private information. I investigate these two effects of rebates by focusing on a rebate contract employed on a large ecommerce marketplace, Alibaba’s Tmall. On the platform, sellers receive a rebate if their yearly revenue exceed pre-determined thresholds. This generates dynamic incentives for sellers to set price lower than their profit-maximization, and heterogeneous incentives across sellers depending on their type. Taking use of the dynamic and heterogeneous rebate incentive, I construct a model of sellers’ dynamic pricing, and estimate a distribution of sellers’ type and its transition over time. I use estimates to separate the incentive effect and the price discrimination effect of rebates. I also do counterfactuals to quantify the effectiveness of rebates in a dynamic environment by shortening the contract period.
讲座主持人：周晓岚
演讲人简介：
Dr. Xiaolu Zhou (周晓露) is an assistant professor of Economics at School of Economics and Wang Yanan Institution of Economic Studies, Xiamen University. She graduated from Pennsylvania State University with a Ph.D. degree in Economics in 2017. Her research field is industrial organization and applied microeconomics.
Dr. Zhou’s current research focus on online marketplaces, for example, how platforms resolve the incomplete information in the consumer side, and how to deal with the relationship with independent users, how to resolve the incentive discrepancy between the platform’s and its independent users’.
Apart from the online marketplaces, Dr. Zhou’s research also lie in computational methods of solving dynamic problems. One of her recent paper propose a new method to solve continuous-choice dynamic problem.