Miguel Godinho Matos Successfully Defended his Ph.D. Thesis
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On June 18 th , 2013, Miguel Godinho Matos successfully defended his doctoral thesis entitled “Essays in Telecommunications Policy,” at the Instituto Superior Técnico of the Universidade Técnica de Lisboa (IST/UTL), with videoconference to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Miguel Godinho Matos worked closely with Pedro Ferreira, his advisor at CMU, Francisco Lima, his advisor at IST/UTL, and with David Krackhardt and Rahul Telang, both from CMU. |
In the abstract of his thesis, Miguel Godinho Matos explains that the work carried out during his Ph.D. comprises three independent essays in Telecommunications Policy Management. The first study focuses “on the deployment of green field next generation access network infrastructures when the national regulatory authority has the power to define geographical markets at sub-national level for which it can apply differentiated regulatory remedies – Geographically Segmented Regulation (GSR).” The second study focuses “on how individual purchase decisions are influenced by the behavior of others in their social circle,” and on the third study Miguel Godinho Matos performed “a randomized field experiment to determine the role that likes play on the sales of movies in Video-on-Demand (VoD).” Following these studies, Miguel Matos was able to get some important results, such as: (1) “supply side interdependencies among markets make the implementation of GSR non trivial,” (2) “the propensity of adoption increases with the proportion of each individual’s adopter friends,” and (3) “self-fulfilling prophecies widely discussed in the literature on the effect of ratings on sales are hard to sustain in markets with costly goods that are sufficiently well-known.”
The jury members of Miguel Godinho Matos Ph.D thesis defense were Pedro Ferreira (CMU), Francisco Lima (IST/UTL), David Krackhardt (CMU), Rahul Telang (CMU), Marvin Sirbu (CMU), and Ravi Bapna (University of Minnesota).
July 2013
