Robert C. Seamans

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Robert C. Seamans

Business & Public Policy Ph. D Candidate
University of California, Berkeley
Haas School of Business

Welcome to my website.  Please check the research link above to access working papers.

My research focuses on strategic and structural barriers to entry.  My job market paper "Competing Against City Hall: Entry Deterrence and New Technology Deployment in Local Cable TV Markets" (available here) looks at strategic barriers to entry used by incumbent cable TV firms to deter entry by public and private entrants.  This paper contributes to existing literature in two main ways. First, it shows that private incumbents act to deter entry by government-owned entities.  In fact, within the context of the cable TV industry, incumbent firms upgrade faster when faced with potential city entry than when faced with potential private firm entry.  Second, this paper shows that incumbent firms use technology upgrades as an entry deterring mechanism.  This finding provides a link between innovation and entry deterrence not present in prior literature.

Another paper, coauthored with Aaron K. Chatterji, shows that credit card interest rates are a structural barrier to entry for certain types of entrepreneurs.  This paper utilizes a quasi-natural experiment to show that credit cards are an important source of capital for African-American entrepreneurs.  A third paper, coauthored with Oliver E. Williamson, shows that start up firms which are unable to access appropriate financing will suffer performance consequences. 

Other work in development seeks to better understand how incumbent firms choose between different entry deterring mechanisms and whether technology can be used to deter new firm entry in other industries.