Journal of Economics最新文献

Abstract

Conventionally, entry is thought to enhance welfare by enhancing competition and hence lowering prices and increasing the output. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, working with an (n) -firm Cournot oligopoly set up and using the trigger strategies, we show that entry may or may not impact welfare. However, entry has the potential to alter the market structure from collusion to Cournot competition, and when it does so, there is a discontinuous rise in welfare.

I propose a two-period matching model of firms and managers to show that managerial career concerns may not guarantee assortative matching in the labor market for managers. In the model, firms compete for managerial talent, and managers are concerned about their reputations. The market updates managers’ reputations whenever their performance is publicly disclosed, which leads to rematching in a subsequent period. I show that some talented managers sit out the market in an earlier period to secure their reputations in a later period. The size distribution of firms—by influencing the wage distribution of managers—is a key determinant of early sitting out: managers’ sitting out may happen under a Power-law distribution of firm size, whereas it never happens under a uniform distribution. The model highlights the roles of firm size distributions and the effects of labor markets on incentive provision within firms.

The present model analyses the possibility of stable cartels under vertical and horizontal product differentiation in the presence of cost asymmetry. This possibility is lesser for an agreement that allows the lower quality product to be produced when the quality difference (net of cost) increases or the level of horizontal product differentiation decreases. However, if side payments are allowed, and the cartel agreement does not allow the lower quality product to be produced, the result changes. In this second situation, the possibility of a stable cartel falls if the quality difference (net of cost) falls or the horizontal product differentiation increases. Welfare may increase after cartel formation if the lower quality good is not produced in the presence of side payments.

This paper examines the effect of antitrust enforcement on the stability of the quantity-setting cartel at different levels of horizontal product differentiation. We derive an incentive compatibility constraint that allows us to examine the effect of antitrust enforcement on cartel stability at different levels of horizontal product differentiation. We verified that both the antitrust enforcement and the degree of product differentiation affect cartel stability. We found that the relationship between the degree of product differentiation and cartel stability is increasing—if the products are more homogeneous, the cartel is less stable. Next, we prove that antitrust enforcement is more efficient (that is, its impacts more intense) in destabilizing the cartel if its products are highly differentiated, i.e., the cartel under antitrust enforcement is more stable when its products tend to be homogeneous.

This paper considers the issue of balancing, i.e., forming an alliance against a superpower, by adopting a contest theory which is widely used in rational choice approach to international relations. The main result is that member states increase their military spending rather than reduce it after they choose balancing, implying that diffusion of responsibility does not occur in equilibrium after balancing. This is because the alliance requires more military spending to respond optimally against the increase in military spending of the unipole as a response to the alliance formation. This paper also shows that more than one state facing against a superpower always prefers balancing by joining in an alliance despite the resulting increase in its military expenditures.

In a homogeneous good industry composed of a dominant firm and a fringe of followers that can choose non-linear pricing contracts to sell the good, we demonstrate that only the dominant firm uses them. Compared with the standard dominant firm model in which only linear pricing contracts are feasible, the dominant firm supplies an inefficiently low number of customers as a way to extract more surplus, since the alternative for customers is a fringe cluttered by excess demand. Thus, allowing market-power firms to deploy non-linear pricing contracts leads to market segmentation, and customers end up worse off than under linear pricing contracts. Fringe firms, in contrast, are better off since they end up charging a higher price for the good. Finally, aggregate welfare under non-linear pricing increases (decreases) as compared to linear pricing if the dominant firm’s share of production capacity is (is not) large enough.