Placement Director: Vijay Krishna
    (814) 863-8543
    vkrishna@psu.edu

Contact Information:
Hae Won Byun
  Home: 814-238-1706
  Cell: 814-360-8040
E-mail: hqb100@psu.edu
Website: http://www.econ.psu.edu/~hqb100/

CITIZENSHIP:

• Republic of Korea (F-1 visa)

EDUCATION:

• Ph.D., Economics, The Pennsylvania State University, Anticipated 2008
• M.A., Economics, Yonsei University, Korea, 1999
• B.A., Economics, Yonsei University, Korea, 1997

PH.D. THESIS:

• “An Empirical Study on Concert Ticket Pricing”
Thesis Advisor: Professor Joris Pinkse

FIELDS:

• Primary: Industrial Organization
• Secondary : Applied Microeconomics

PAPERS:

• “Why Concert Tickets Are Underpriced” (Job Market Paper)
• “The Size of the Affiliation Effect” (with Joris Pinkse)

GRANTS &
FELLOWSHIPS:

• Dissertation Support Competition, College of Liberal Arts, Penn State, Spring 2007
• Korean American Scholarship, 2001

TEACHING EXPERIENCE:

• Recitation Leader: Intermediate Macroeconomics
• General Education Teaching Assistant: Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics (Writing Project)
• Teaching Assistant: Principles of Microeconomics and
  Macroeconomics, Intermediate Microeconomics

RESEARCH EXPERIENCE:

• Research Assistant for Professor Joris Pinkse, Summer 2005, 2006
• Research Assistant, Korean Economic Research Institute
  (KERI), March – June 2000

PRESENTATIONS & OTHER PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES:

• “Why Concert Tickets Are Underpriced, ” Guest Speaker, Econ 400M (Media and Arts Economics), Penn State, February 2007
• “Economic Issues in the Popular Music Market,” Applied Meetings (Graduate Applied Economics Workshop), Penn State, June 2005

REFERENCES:

• Professor Joris Pinkse
• Professor Edward Coulson
• Professor Mark Roberts

THESIS ABSTRACT

This paper investigates the reason for ticket under-pricing given the existence of ticket resale markets. Even though there exists a persistent excess demand, which makes ticket resale profitable, promoters and bands rarely exploit this fact by raising their ticket prices. Here, I model the ticket price decision of a promoter and an artist based on two potential explanations: the artist's future profit and merchandising profit. This model suggests that when artists or promoters consider their future profit as well as their current profit, or they consider merchandising revenue as well as ticket revenue, they may charge a price lower than the price which maximizes only their static ticket profit. In order to test the credibility of these potential explanations, I estimate a ticket supply equation with Pollstar Boxoffice historical data. The estimation results suggest that both the future profit of an artist and merchandising profit are credible explanations for ticket under-pricing.

Essay 2. “The Size of the Affiliation Effect” (with Joris Pinkse)  

The objective of this paper is to investigate whether the affiliation effect is of only marginal importance or if it is of the same order of magnitude as the winner's curse and competition effects. This paper is an application of Pinkse and Tan (2005) in which they showed that bids can be decreasing in the number of bidders in private value auctions provided that the bidders' private values are affiliated. They argue that the affiliation effect is also present in common value auctions. If the affiliation effect is substantial then a regression of bids on the number of bidders will not help in distinguishing between the common and private value paradigms. We use the Offshore Continental Shelf auction data set to estimate these effects and find that the affiliation effect is smaller than the other two effects in terms of size.