Browsing by Subject "Product"
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Item Effect of lawsuits on stock price compared to product withdrawal: a focus on the consequences of Vioxx's adverse effects(Texas Tech University, 2006-08) Watson, Kimberly S.; Xu, Ke Tom; Steinmeier, Thomas L.Pharmaceutical companies are plagued with lawsuits in today’s society. Some companies will hastily remove a product from the market before the negative side effects of the drug can be fully established for fear of severe losses due to lawsuits. Lawsuits will occur whether the drug is left on the market or not, as seen with the multiple cases both decided and pending against Merck for their drug, Vioxx. Using stock analysis as a measurement, it is evident in the case of Vioxx that removing a product from market will have a more detrimental effect on the manufacturer than the lawsuits will. In the cases where a drug could ethically be left on the market with additional warnings for those that may experience negative side effects, it is better for the company to continue to market the product and endure the lawsuits than remove the product and face the lawsuits alone.Item Essays on international trade(2010-05) French, Scott Thomas; Corbae, Dean; Abrevaya, Jason; Freitas, Kripa; Ramondo, Natalia; Ruhl, KimThis dissertation consists of three essays pertaining to the causes of the levels and composition of the international trade flows of nations, and the consequential implications for the levels of per capita income and welfare of their populations. The first of these documents a pattern of comparative advantage in product level, bilateral trade data that conventional quantitative trade models have difficulty explaining. It goes on to develop a theory of product level productivity differences based on endogenous differences in the allocation of research and development into product and process innovation across countries over time, and it shows that, when fitted to cross-country manufacturing wage data, the predicted product level technology distribution is consistent with the observed trade pattern. The second essay shows that the distribution of technology levels inferred in the first essay can help explain the inability of both ad-hoc and theoretically based gravity models of trade to account for the observed positive correlation between the percentage of manufacturing output that is traded and countries' per capita income. It derives a modified gravity equation based on a Ricardian model of trade with deterministic product level technology differences across countries. It then uses estimates from a product level gravity estimation to compute the component of this equation that differs from a conventional gravity equation in order to determine the extent to which the observed concentration of comparative advantage in a common set of products for low-income countries explains the small percentage of their output that is exported. The final essay shows that a simple model of firm profit maximization in the presence of sunk costs of entering the export market is broadly consistent with the observed persistence of exporting behavior in firm level data. It uses this simple model and moments from data on US manufacturing firms to estimate the value of the sunk export entry costs faced by these firms using an indirect inference strategy. These costs are shown to be substantial relative the revenue stream of a typical firm.Item Market study and design of an induction heating product to warm weighlifting barbells(2014-05) Doglio, Jean Marie; Crawford, Richard H.; Hall, Matthew JIn order to solve the problem of discomfort and injury caused by weightlifting with barbells in cold temperatures, an induction heater product was designed to warm cold barbells in 15 minutes or less; currently no other product exists to address this issue. The primary market identified for the product is lifters located in cold climates who train in their home garages, and the secondary market is unheated membership-based gyms. Product development steps documented in this thesis include customer needs gathering and analysis, concept generation and variant development, and heating performance simulation.