Wednesday, November 17, 2021

John Morgan (1967-2021)

 Here's his obituary from Berkeley Haas, that I learned of only recently:

‘A giant of a person’: Economist John Morgan dies at 53 OCTOBER 29, 2021| BY LAURA COUNTS

"Professor John Morgan, an economist who found elegant new ways to analyze the world through the lens of game theory, and whose popular classes and sage mentorship made a deep impression on his students, passed away Oct. 6 at age 53. He died peacefully at his Walnut Creek home.

"During his nearly two decades at Berkeley Haas, Morgan left his mark through his prolific and wide-ranging research, his unconventional teaching that drew on strategy games he invented, and his generous leadership. He had been struggling with a painful autoimmune disease that put him on medical leave, but he continued with his research and had planned to resume teaching in the spring."

************

A paper of his that springs to mind is this one:

... plus shipping and handling: Revenue (non) equivalence in field experiments on ebay, by Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan, 2006, The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, https://doi.org/10.2202/1538-0637.1429

Abstract: Many firms divide the price a consumer pays for a good into two pieces---the price for the item itself and the price for shipping and handling. With fully rational customers, the exact division between the two prices is irrelevant---only the total price matters. We test this hypothesis by selling matched pairs of CDs and Xbox games in a series of field experiments on eBay. In theory, the ending auction price should vary inversely with the shipping charge to leave the total price paid constant. Contrary to the theory, we find that charging a high shipping cost and starting the auction at a low opening price leads to higher numbers of bidders and higher revenues when the shipping charge is not excessive. We show that these results can be accounted for by boundedly rational bidding behavior such as loss-aversion with separate mental accounts for different attributes of the price or disregard for shipping costs.


Here's his Google Scholar page: John Morgan

No comments: