Industrial Organization Commons^™

Ports And Ladders: The Nature And Relevance Of Internal Labor Markets In A Changing World, Paul Osterman, M. Diane Burton

M. Diane Burton

[Excerpt] Many believe that the nature of careers has changed dramatically in the past twenty years. One scholar writes that internal labor markets have been 'demolished', while a human resources manager at Intel comments that, in contrast to the past, today, 'You own your own employability. You are responsible' (Knoke 2001: 31). The idea of the 'boundaryless career' seems increasingly popular (Arthur and Rousseau 1996). If it is in fact true that the old rules for organizing work have disappeared, this would represent a fundamental change for employees. It would also have major implications for how scholars think about the …

All-Units Discounts As A Partial Foreclosure Device, Yong Chao, Guofu Tan

Yong Chao

All-units discounts (AUD) are pricing schemes that lower a buyer’s marginal price on every unit purchased when the buyer’s purchase exceeds or is equal to a pre-specified threshold. The AUD and related conditional rebates are commonly used in both final-goods and intermediate-goods markets. Although the existing literature has thus far focused on interpreting the AUD as a price discrimination tool, investment incentive program, or rent-shifting instrument, the antitrust concerns on the AUD and related conditional rebates are often their plausible exclusionary effects.

In this article, we investigate strategic effects of volume-threshold based AUD used by a dominant firm in the …

When Less Is More: The Benefit Of Limits On Executive Pay, Peter Cebon, Benjamin Hermalin

Peter Cebon

We derive conditions under which limits on executive compensation can enhance efficiency and benefit shareholders (but not executives). Having their hands tied in the future allows a board of directors to credibly enter into relational contracts with executives that are more efficient than performance-contingent contracts. This has implications for the ideal composition of the board. The analysis also offers insights into the political economy of executive-compensation reform.

Pay-What-You-Want Pricing: Can It Be Profitable?, Yong Chao, Jose Fernandez, Babu Nahata

Yong Chao

Using a game theoretic framework, we show that not only can pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing generate positive profits, but it can also be more profitable than charging a fixed price to all consumers. Further, whenever it is more profitable, it is also Pareto-improving. We derive conditions in terms of two parameters, namely the marginal cost of production and the psychological cost of the consumer for paying too little compared to her reference price.

The paper makes the following contributions to the existing literature. First, we endogenize the choice of pricing strategies—PWYW vs. fixed price. Thus rather than solely focusing on the …

Vertical Probabilistic Selling: The Role Of Consumer Anticipated Regret, Yong Chao, Lin Liu, Dongyuan Zhan

Yong Chao

This paper studies vertical probabilistic selling (mixing products with different qualities) when firms compete, and consumers have different abilities to anticipate the potential post-purchase regret raised by the possibility of obtaining the inferior products. We show that, when consumers have either no or full ability to anticipate the regret, probabilistic selling emerges only when the product differentiation between firms is intermediate. However, when consumers have partial ability to anticipate the regret, probabilistic selling will arise more often and yield higher profit compared with the previous two cases. This is due to the “reverse quality discrimination”: the perceived quality of the …