Industrial Organization Commons^™

On The Optimality Of One-Size-Fits-All Contracts: The Limited Liability Case, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper studies which social networks maximize trust and welfare when agreements are implicitly enforced. We study a repeated trust game in which trading opportunities arise exogenously and a social network determines the information each player has. We show that cohesive communities, modeled as social networks of complete components, emerge as the optimal community design. Cohesive communities generate some degree of common knowledge of transpired play that allows players to coordinate their punishments and, as a result, yield relatively high equilibrium payoffs. We also show that when news swiftly travel through the network, Pareto efficient networks are minimally connected: the …

Optimal Task Assignments, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper studies optimal task assignments in a risk neutral principal-agent model in which agents are compensated according to an aggregated performance measure. The main trade-off involved is one in which specialization allows the implementation of any possible effort profile, while multitasking constraint the set of implementable effort profiles. Yet, the implementation of any effort profile in this set is less expensive than that under specialization. The principal prefers multitasking to specialization except when tasks are complements and the output after success is small enough so that it is not second-best optimal to implement high effort in each task. This …

The Price Of Unobservability: Moral Hazard And Limited Liability, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

This article studies a principal-agent problem with discrete outcome and effort space. The principal and the agent are risk neutral and the latter is subject to limited liability. For a given monitoring technology, we consider the maximum possible ratio between the first best social welfare to the social welfare arising from the principal's optimal pay-for-performance contract (the price of unobservability). Our main results provide tight bounds for this price. Key parameters to these bounds are number of possible efforts, the likelihood ratio evaluated at the highest outcome, and the ratio between costs of the highest and the lowest efforts. The …

Financial Liberalization, Market Structure And Credit Penetration, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Ronald Fischer Full Professor, Felipe Ramirez

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper shows that the effects of financial liberalization on the credit market of a small and capital constrained economy depend on the market structure of domestic banks prior to liberalization. Specifically, under perfect competition in the domestic credit market prior to liberalization, liberalization leads to lower domestic interest rates, in turn leading to increased credit penetration. However, when the initial market structure is one of imperfect competition, liberalization can lead to the exclusion of less wealthy entrepreneurs from the credit market. This provides a rationale for the mixed empirical evidence concerning the effects of liberalization on access to credit …

Mergers And Ceo Power, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof.

Felipe Balmaceda

In this paper I propose a model of mergers in which synergies and CEO power play a crucial role. A merger is modeled as a bargaining game between the acquiring and target board of directors with the gains from a merger divided according to the generalized Nash-bargaining solution. The model's implications are consistent with the available empirical evidence on stock returns, and yield some new untested implications that are mainly related to the relationship between CEO power, cor- porate governance and mergers. Finally, the model sheds light on the relationship between aggregate merger activity, synergies and CEO power. (JEL: G34, …

Asymmetric Dynamic Pricing In A Local Gasoline Retail Market, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Paula Soruco

Felipe Balmaceda

Asymmetric-price adjustment is a common phenomenon in many markets around the world, particularly in retail gasoline markets. This paper studies the existence of this phenomenon in the retail gasoline market in the city of Santiago, Chile, using a data set of weekly gas station prices that covers a period of almost four years. We found that prices adjust asymmetrically, and the asymmetry is different for branded gas stations and unbranded stations. In addition, we found that the asymmetry for high-margin stations is statistically equivalent to that for low-margin stations. This evidence is suggestive of collusion as a rationale for the …

Vertical Integration In Unregulated Industries With Essential Facilities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Eduardo Savedra Prof

Felipe Balmaceda

In this paper, we consider a market that is operated by a non-integrated monopoly upstream that owns an important essential facility and an duopolistic market downstream that is facing entry in the monopolistic upstream market. We show that: (i) for small fixed costs of building a new facility the unique equilibrium entails vertical integration for all firms and duplication of essential facilities; (ii) for an intermediate range, the unique equilibrium entails full vertical integration and a shared-facility; and (iii) for large fixed costs, the unique equilibrium entails vertical integration by the incumbent, no integration by the entrant and a shared-facility. …