Innovation incentives and competition in the hard disk drive industry
Author(s)
Wu, Xiaohua Sherry
DownloadFull printable version (4.430Mb)
Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Economics.
Advisor
Panle Jia Barwick and Stephen P Ryan.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Firms in the hard disk drive industry are continually engaging in R & D and improving the quality of their products. We explore various determinants of the product innovation incentives for firms concerned with both their static and expected future profitability. We estimate the observed innovation outcomes as a function of market condition variables which have significant impact on innovation decisions. In addition, we estimate logit utilities that describe the marginal willingness to pay for quality improvements. One aspect of utility is that the willingness to pay for faster access time to data may be initially low but increases over time. The firms' decisions to introduce faster access time are partly motivated by dynamic considerations.
Description
Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2011. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-53).
Date issued
2011Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of EconomicsPublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Economics.