Journal of Economics最新文献

In the context of firms’ endogenous choice between price and quantity contracts, we show that when firms choose different strategic variables under the destination principle, the government of the quantity-oriented firm imposes a negative commodity tax rate. However, the government of the price-oriented firm imposes a positive commodity tax rate when either (1) the product homogeneity is high enough or (2) the product homogeneity is below a critical level and trade costs are sufficiently low. Under the origin principle, the government of the price-oriented firm provides a higher subsidy than that of the quantity-oriented firm. Regarding the government’s decision on the commodity taxation principle, the origin principle may result in Cournot or Bertrand competition, as well as a mixed strategy Cournot–Bertrand competition, as opposed to the destination principle, which only allows for Cournot competition. In the spirit of economic integration, the origin principle dominates the destination principle.

I derive a stationary distribution of lifetime wealth accumulation factor in a model featuring inheritance of productivity, wealth, and health condition, where lifetime wealth is the sum of financial wealth and human wealth. Assuming ex-ante heterogeneity in the death rate, I show that the distribution of the lifetime wealth accumulation factor is constituted by a weighted sum of shape-differing Pareto distributions. It is shown that raising the wealth tax reduces inequality of lifetime wealth not only within a death-rate type but also across all the death-rate types.

We examine the licensing decision of a non-producer innovator with a new technology that enables the manufacture of a saleable product. The technology is licensed and each user privately knows its innovation-related production cost, whereas the licensor only knows, with a certain probability, that this cost may be low (the user is efficient) or high (the user is inefficient). When a single licence is granted through separating contracts, only the contract intended for the inefficient user involves a per-unit royalty, but when two licences are granted through separating contracts, the contracts intended for the inefficient and efficient users both feature a per-unit royalty. However, screening is less likely as the number of licences increases, to the point that the licensor does not screen users when granting three licences. Additionally, whereas the diffusion of the innovation is socially insufficient under symmetric information, with asymmetric information it may be socially optimal. Finally, when licensing with contracts involving an ad-valorem royalty is also feasible the licensor finds it less attractive than licensing with a per-unit royalty.

Recent developments in dynamic consumption theory have shown that risk-loving agents, much like their risk-averse analogues, can exhibit downside risk aversion (prudence) and thus demand precautionary savings. I complement this finding by showing that risk-seeking preferences also magnify the role of natural borrowing limits in shaping consumers’ behavior, causing risk lovers to increase savings against income uncertainty in cases where risk averters would not: even imprudent risk lovers may engage in precautionary saving.

Two-sided platforms connect two or more distinct user groups. Agents on such a platform not only value the participation of users from a different group but are also affected by the same-side network effects that arise from the participation of agents in their own group. We study how negative same-side network effects among sellers affect the participation levels and profit of a monopoly platform. We use a novel specification of the CES utility function to model our consumer preferences, where taste for variety and substitutability are not interrelated. We find that when the platform implements subscription pricing on both sides, an increase in the intensity of competition (higher negative same-side network effects) amongst sellers leads to more participation from both buyers and sellers and there is an increase in the profit of the platform. On the other hand, when the platform can only charge a fee from the seller, participation on both sides first rises and then falls. The platform’s profit also follows the same trend. We also briefly discuss how prices of competing platforms change when there is an increase in the intensity of competition amongst sellers.

It is well known that, for a specific tax, its economic incidence does not depend on which side of the market has the legal obligation to pay the tax. In this paper, we show that, for an ad valorem tax, this legal incidence does matter for the economic incidence. In particular, when a government imposes an ad valorem tax rate on the sale of a commodity, the resulting reduction in the market equilibrium level of sales will be larger when sellers are obliged to pay the tax than when buyers are obliged to pay the tax.

This paper studies a multi-task tournament in which each agent undertakes two tasks. Agents’ efforts on one of the tasks create externalities on the performances of other competing agents. We discuss the design of an optimal tournament to achieve a social optimum in the presence of such externalities. In particular, we show that the traditional single-prized tournament is unable to elicit a social optimum, while a task-specific, multi-prized tournament proposed in this paper can achieve a socially optimal outcome.

We examine the implications of different ways in which downstream firms can exercise buyer power over their upstream suppliers. We derive several variations of a model in which two upstream firms supply a differentiated product under exclusive contracts to two downstream firms which compete in prices in the retail market. We begin with a benchmark model (upstream first-mover pricing), and then compare its outcomes with those of models that feature different modes of exercising buyer power: downstream first-mover pricing; Nash Bargaining with linear and two-part tariffs; and vertical integration. We rank these five regimes in terms of wholesale and retail prices, social welfare, the pass-through rates of changes in upstream costs, and downstream firms’ profits. We show under what conditions more powerful downstream firms benefit consumers by exercising ‘countervailing power’ against upstream suppliers. We also show that the lump-sum component of the two-part tariff can go in either direction (a slotting allowance or a franchise fee), depending in a very precise way only on parameters representing bargaining power and the degree of product differentiation. Exactly the same configuration of these parameters is shown to determine the ranking of wholesale and retail prices, pass-through rates, and downstream profits, as between the Nash Bargaining regimes with linear and two-part tariffs. Finally, we show that downstream firms which possess buyer power always prefer vertical arrangements that are socially sub-optimal.

Abstract

Common wisdom suggests that cross-holdings can lead to significant output contraction, and thus hurt consumers. On the contrary, we demonstrate that cross-holdings may increase industry output and benefit consumers in an asymmetric Cournot oligopoly with the presence of a welfare-maximizing tax/subsidy policy. The government will strategically use the tax/subsidy policy to regulate the market outcomes in anticipation of the adverse effect of cross-holdings, which could raise industry output and benefit consumers in certain situations depending on the cost distributions and cross-holding structures.

We show that the implications of a merger on collusion sustainability change significantly from the extant literature if merger is not profitable in the punishment subgame where firms play non-cooperative Cournot–Nash game. Merger either does not affect collusion sustainability or it may decrease or increase collusion sustainability, depending on the output allocation for the merged firm. Our paper has the following implication for antitrust policies. If merger is observed, the authority will expect an industry-wide collusion, since merger will occur in our analysis provided it increases collusion sustainability.