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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
On The Alignment Of Consumer Surplus And Total Surplus Under Competitive Price Discrimination, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
On The Alignment Of Consumer Surplus And Total Surplus Under Competitive Price Discrimination, Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, Stephen Morris
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
A number of producers of heterogeneous goods with heterogeneous costs compete in prices. When producers know their own production costs and consumers know their values, consumer surplus and total surplus are aligned: the information structure and equilibrium that maximize consumer surplus also maximize total surplus. We report when alignment extends to the case where either consumers are uncertain about their own values or producers are uncertain about their own costs, and we also give examples showing when it does not. Less information for either producers or consumers may intensify competition in a way that benefits consumers but results in inefficient …
The No-Arbitrage Hypothesis And Inertia In Forward Markets, José Luis Ferreira, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti
The No-Arbitrage Hypothesis And Inertia In Forward Markets, José Luis Ferreira, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti
ESI Working Papers
Allaz (1992) showed that the no-arbitrage condition in forward markets is obtained as a feature of the equilibrium if the model allows for strategic behavior on the part of the buyers. He showed that having active buyers is equivalent to passive buyers plus the no-arbitrage hypothesis. We test this experimentally in a forward market by allowing for active buyer’s under exogenously or endogenously determined market closure. We further test an inertia hypothesis that looks at whether past participation in a spot-market results in quantities being limited in the forward market stage. Importantly, the no-arbitrage condition can only be tested with …
Mixed Bundling In Oligopoly Markets, Jidong Zhou
Mixed Bundling In Oligopoly Markets, Jidong Zhou
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper proposes a framework for studying competitive mixed bundling with an arbitrary number of firms. We examine both a firm’s incentive to introduce mixed bundling and equilibrium tariffs when all firms adopt the mixed-bundling strategy. In the duopoly case, relative to separate sales, mixed bundling has ambiguous impacts on prices, profit and consumer surplus; with many firms, however, mixed bundling typically lowers all prices, harms firms and benefits consumers.
Fixed Costs And The Division Of Labor, Haiwen Zhou
Fixed Costs And The Division Of Labor, Haiwen Zhou
Economics Faculty Publications
How market size and the level of coordination costs determine the degree of specialization is studied in an infinite horizon model with the amount of capital determined endogenously. Firms producing the same intermediate good engage in oligopolistic competition and choose the degree of specialization of their technologies to maximize profits. A more specialized technology is a technology with a lower marginal cost, but a higher fixed cost. Interestingly, the relationship between the level of coordination costs and a firm’s degree of specialization is ambiguous. A firm in a country with a larger market size, more patient citizens, or a higher …
Pricing Stallion Seasons For An Individual Stallion: The Existence Of Top Tier Pricing And Market Power, Robert L. Losey Ph.D., Thomas E. Lambert 1959-
Pricing Stallion Seasons For An Individual Stallion: The Existence Of Top Tier Pricing And Market Power, Robert L. Losey Ph.D., Thomas E. Lambert 1959-
Faculty Scholarship
This paper is an academic treatment of the pricing of stallion seasons (a “season” confers the right to breed a mare to a stallion) The commercial stallion seasons market can be represented schematically as a triangle that normally has a single-digit number of stallions offering high-priced seasons in the narrow apex, a moderate number of stallions composing the middle section, and over 150 in the $5,000-$10,000 range. We argue that it is logical for profit-maximizing stallion managers, most especially those in the apex of the stallion seasons triangle, to charge different prices for different groups of buyers of the same …
Neoliberalism And Monopoly In The Motion Picture Industry, Michael S. Wartenbe
Neoliberalism And Monopoly In The Motion Picture Industry, Michael S. Wartenbe
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Monopolies and industry concentration have returned in our time, as did the ramifications in the globalized political economy. One of the most impactful in our daily lives are the Mass Media Conglomerates who not only own the majority of film, television, and news we access, but increasingly control the means of accessing it, from cable to digital. While many are familiar with these corporations via their services and products, less known by the public are their political operations and close cooperation with Washington. This is due to the lack of holistic analysis of the industry and cooperation in the media …
Competition And Monopoly In The U.S. Economy: What Do Industrial Concentration Data Tell?, Leila Davis, ÖZgüR Orhangazi
Competition And Monopoly In The U.S. Economy: What Do Industrial Concentration Data Tell?, Leila Davis, ÖZgüR Orhangazi
PERI Working Papers
A recent series of academic studies, think-tank reports, and news articles shows widespread attention to rising industrial concentration and market power in the U.S. economy. In this paper, we focus on concentration in the U.S. nonfinancial corporate sector to make three contributions to this literature. First, we trace the theoretical origins of the debate on industrial concentration, and show that there is a certain degree of ambiguity surrounding the expected consequences of concentration and monopolization for nonfinancial firms. Second, we use industry- level concentration data to describe recent trends in average concentration. We show that, while concentration increases across the …
Unemployment And Economic Integration For Developing Countries, Haiwen Zhou
Unemployment And Economic Integration For Developing Countries, Haiwen Zhou
Economics Faculty Publications
While financial or trade integration between countries may increase the size of the market and aid the adoption of more advanced technologies, will it also increase the level of urban unemployment for a developing country? In this model, there is unemployment in the urban sector. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose increasing returns technologies to maximize profits. Financial firms provide capital to manufacturing firms and they also engage in oligopolistic competition. We show that an increase in the wage rate in the manufacturing sector changes neither the level of technology nor the level of employment in the manufacturing …
The Choice Of Technology And Equilibrium Wage Rigidity, Haiwen Zhou
The Choice Of Technology And Equilibrium Wage Rigidity, Haiwen Zhou
Economics Faculty Publications
In this general equilibrium model, firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose increasing returns technologies to maximize profits. Capital and labor are the two factors of production. The existence of efficiency wages leads to unemployment. The model is able to explain some interesting observations of the labor market. First, even though there is neither long-term labor contract nor costs of wage adjustment, wage rigidity is an equilibrium phenomenon: an increase in the exogenous job separation rate, the size of the population, the cost of exerting effort, and the probability that shirking is detected will not change the equilibrium wage rate. …
Allocative Efficiency, Mark-Ups, And The Welfare Gains From Trade, Thomas J. Holmes, Wen-Tai Hsu, Sanghoon Lee
Allocative Efficiency, Mark-Ups, And The Welfare Gains From Trade, Thomas J. Holmes, Wen-Tai Hsu, Sanghoon Lee
Research Collection School Of Economics
This paper develops an index of allocative efficiency that depends upon the distribution of mark-ups across goods and is separable from an index of standard Ricardian gains from trade. It determines how changes in trade frictions affect allocative efficiency in an oligopoly model of international trade, decomposing the effect into the cost-change channel and the price-change channel. Formulas are derived shedding light on the signs and magnitudes of the two channels. In symmetric country models, trade tends to increase allocative efficiency through the cost-change channel, yielding a welfare benefit beyond productive efficiency gains. In contrast, the price-change channel has ambiguous …
Effects Of Ad-Valorem Taxes On Location Decision Under Free Entry Cournot Oligopoly, Yeung-Nan Shieh
Effects Of Ad-Valorem Taxes On Location Decision Under Free Entry Cournot Oligopoly, Yeung-Nan Shieh
Faculty Publications
This paper examines the impact of the ad-valorem commodity tax as a policy device on the location decision of undifferentiated oligopolistic firms with free entry. It shows that: (1) When the distance between the plant location and the output market is held constant, the optimum location for the oligopolistic firm would be independent of the ad-valorem tax if the production function is homothetic, and (2) when the distance between the plant location and the output market is a decision variable, the optimum location for the oligopolistic firm will move closer to the output market if the demand function is linear …
Strategic Environmental Policy And International Trade In Asymmetric Oligopoly Markets, Yann Duval, Stephen F. Hamilton
Strategic Environmental Policy And International Trade In Asymmetric Oligopoly Markets, Yann Duval, Stephen F. Hamilton
Economics
This paper examines optimal cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes for the case in which a polluting input is used to produce an internationally-traded finished product. The model allows for terms-of-trade effects under oligopoly and employs a general specification of the environmental damage function that encompasses special cases of local, global, and transboundary externalities. The model has several implications for public finance. For example, inefficiently high environmental taxes may be optimal for a net exporting country in non-cooperative circumstances, as the motive to shift rent by selecting an inefficiently low tax rate is countervailed by the incentive to shift the burden …
Returns To Public Investments In Agriculture With Imperfect Downstream Competition, Stephen F. Hamilton, David L. Sunding
Returns To Public Investments In Agriculture With Imperfect Downstream Competition, Stephen F. Hamilton, David L. Sunding
Economics
A multiple-market framework is developed to measure the size and distribution of research benefits. The model considers an upstream raw product market and a downstream finished product market and allows for imperfect competition in the intermediary food-processing sector. A central conceptual result is derived: an increase in raw product output is a sufficient condition for cost- reducing innovations in the farm sector to increase social welfare. A special case of linear farm supply and isoelastic processing production functions reveals that necessary conditions for welfare to decrease are a convergent farm supply shift, an oligopsonistic upstream market configuration, and increasing returns-to-scale …
Repeated Trade And The Velocity Of Money, Pradeep Dubey, Siddhartha Sahi, Martin Shubik
Repeated Trade And The Velocity Of Money, Pradeep Dubey, Siddhartha Sahi, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
There are two sources of inefficiency of strategic equilibria (SE) in market mechanisms. The first is the oligopolistic effect, which occurs when an agent can single-handedly influence prices. With a continuum of agents we get “perfect competition” and this effect is, of course, wiped out. But the inefficiency of SE’s may nevertheless persist because agents are not “perfectly liquid,” i.e., the constraints of the mechanism are such that they cannot carry out arbitrary trades at the market prices. Our main result is that, if enough repeated rounds of trade are permitted within a single utility period, then the liquidity problem …
Potential Competition Mergers: A Structural Synthesis, Joseph F. Brodley
Potential Competition Mergers: A Structural Synthesis, Joseph F. Brodley
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
Oligopoly Power Under The Sherman And Clayton Acts -- From Economic Theory To Legal Policy, Joseph F. Brodley
Oligopoly Power Under The Sherman And Clayton Acts -- From Economic Theory To Legal Policy, Joseph F. Brodley
Articles by Maurer Faculty
No abstract provided.
An Experimental Study Of Competitive Market Behavior, Vernon L. Smith
An Experimental Study Of Competitive Market Behavior, Vernon L. Smith
Economics Faculty Articles and Research
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in experimental games such as management decision-making games and games designed to simulate oligopolistic market phenomena. This article reports on a series of experimental games designed to study some of the hypotheses of neoclassical competitive market theory.