Industrial Organization Program meeting.

• Position: Program and Working Group Meetings

The NBER's Industrial Organization (IO) Program, directed by Nancy L. Rose of MIT, met jointly with NBER's Program on Environmental and Energy Economics at Stanford University on February 8. Erin T. Mansur, NBER and Yale School of Management, and Catherine Wolfram, NBER and University of California, Berkeley, organized the combined session. On the following day, the 10 Program held its winter meeting, also at Stanford University. The following papers were discussed during the two-day gathering:

Haitao Yin, University of Michigan, and Howard Kunreuther and Matthew W. White, University of Pennsylvania and NBER, "Risk-Based Pricing and Risk-Reducing Effort: Does the Private Insurance Market Reduce Environmental Accidents?"

Discussant: Lucas Davis, University of Michigan

Jean-Francois Houde, University of Wisconsin, Madison, "Spatial Differentiation in Retail Markets for Gasoline"

Discussant: Justine Hastings, Yale University and NBER

Meredith Fowlie, University of Michigan, "Incomplete Environmental Regulation, Imperfect Competition, and Emissions Leakage"

Discussant: Stephen Ryan, MIT and NBER

Christopher R. Knittel, University of California, Davis and NBER, and Konstantinos Metaxoglou, Bates White, "Estimation of Random Coefficient Demand Models: Challenges, Difficulties and Warnings"

Discussant: Frank Wolak, Stanford University and NBER

Orley Ashenfelter, Princeton University and NBER, and Daniel Hosken, Federal Trade Commission, "The Effect of Mergers on Consumer Prices: Evidence from Five Selected Case Studies" (NBER Working Paper No. 13859)

Discussant: Carl Shapiro, University of California, Berkeley

Paul B. Ellickson and Stephannie Houghton, Duke University, and Christopher Timmins, Duke University and NBER, "Estimating Network Economies in Retail Chains: A Revealed Preference Approach"

Discussant: Tim Bresnahan, Stanford University and NBER

Jean-Pierre Dube, Gunter J. Hitsch, and Pradeep Chintagunta, University of Chicago, "Tipping and Concentration in Markets with Indirect Network Effects"

Discussant: Dan Ackerberg, University of California, Los Angeles

Yin and his co-authors ask whether risk-based pricing, which is common in private insurance markets but rarely incorporated in government assurance programs, promotes risk-reducing effort. They analyze accidental underground fuel tank leaks--a source of environmental damage to water supplies--over a 14-year period, using disaggregate (facility-level) data and policy variation in the...