This dissertation consists of three essays in empirical industrial organization. Chapter 1 introduces the three essays and describes their main results. In chapter 2, I examine consumer demand for variety. The consumption of a good typically creates satiation that diminishes the marginal utility of consuming more. This temporal satiation induces consumers to increase their stimulation level by seeking variety and therefore substitute towards other goods (substitutability across time) or other differentiated versions (products) of the good (substitutability across products). The literature on variety-seeking has developed along two strands, each focusing on only one type of substitutability. I specify a demand model that attempts to link these two strands of the literature. This issue is economically relevant because both types of substitutability are important for retailers and manufacturers in designing intertemporal price discrimination strategies. In chapter 3, which draws upon joint work with Peter Davis, we specify a new method of uncovering demand information from market level data on differentiated products. In particular, we propose a globally consistent continuous-choice demand model with distinct advantages over the models currently in use and describe the econometric techniques for its estimation. The proposed model combines key properties of both the discrete- and continuous-choice traditions: i) it is flexible in the sense of Diewert (1974), ii) it is globally consistent in the sense it can deal with entry and exit of products over time, and iii) incorporates a structural error term. In chapter 4, I examine market dominance and barriers to competition in financial trading venues. As of 1 November 2007, the Market in Financial Instruments Directive introduced venue competition in the European cash trading market. I argue that, although positive, the impact on the degree of actual competition may be limited due to two barriers to competition: i) direct network effects together with increasing returns to scale and ii) post-trading constraints.
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