Journal of Industrial Economics最新文献

This article proposes a semiparametric discrete choice model that incorporates a nonparametric specification for income effects. The model allows for the flexible estimation of demand curvature, which has significant implications for pricing and policy analysis in oligopolistic markets. Our estimation algorithm adopts a method of sieve approximation with shape restrictions in a nested fixed-point algorithm. Applying this framework to the Japanese automobile market, we conduct a pass-through analysis of feebates and merger simulations. Our model predicts a higher pass-through rate and more significant merger effects than parametric demand models, highlighting the importance of flexibly estimating demand curvature.

The conditions for monopolization to be good for social welfare are examined. Social welfare can be higher when a monopoly sells to a monopoly, with double margins, than when a competitive industry sells to a downstream Cournot oligopoly with differing efficiency levels. This requires inverse demand to be sufficiently concave, and cannot hold when demand is convex. When there are no vertical issues conditions are found for elimination of an inefficient firm to raise welfare, building on Lahiri and Ono (1988). In general greater demand concavity increases the relative importance of the benefit of redistributing output to the efficient firm.

We study the design of online platforms that aggregate information and facilitate transactions. Leading players in the industry (e.g., the Booking Group) hold two types of platforms in their portfolio: revealing platforms that disclose the identity of transaction partners (like Booking.com) and anonymous platforms that do not (like Hotwire.com). Anonymous platforms offer discounts but lead to inefficient matching between consumers and firms. We develop a model in which horizontally differentiated firms sell to heterogeneous consumers both directly and via a platform that enlarges the pool of consumers they can attract. The platform charges firms for transactions it intermediates and can choose to offer an anonymous sales channel in addition to a revealing one. We show that offering both sales channels is profitable not only because it allows the platform to implement price discrimination, as suggested by the literature on opaque selling, but also because it improves rent extraction. The anonymous channel breaks the link between the price on the revealing channel and the firms' outside option; moreover, it can reduce double marginalisation. The welfare impact of the anonymous channel is ambiguous: while it sometimes leads to market expansion, it also causes inefficiently high transport costs.

A central tenet in the field of industrial organisation is that increasing/decreasing market concentration is associated with increased/reduced markups. But does this variation affect every consumer to the same extent? Previous literature finds price dispersion exists even for homogeneous goods, at least partially as a result of heterogeneity in consumer engagement with the market. We study this question by linking demographic and income heterogeneity across local areas to the impact of changing market concentration on markups. With 15 years of station-level motor fuel price data from Western Australia and information on instances of local market exit and entry, we apply a non-parametric causal forest approach to explore the heterogeneity in the effect of exit/entry. The paper provides evidence of the distributional effect of changing market concentration. Areas with lower income experience a larger increase in petrol stations' price margin as a result of market exit. On the other hand, entry does not benefit the same low-income areas with a larger reduction in the margin than in high-income areas. Policy implications include a need to further focus on increasing engagement by low-income consumers.

Grzybowski, L. and Nicolle, A., 2021, ‘Estimating Consumer Inertia in Repeated Choices of Smartphones,’ The Journal of Industrial Economics, 69(1), pp. 33–82. https://doi.org/10.1111/joie.12239

In the footnote on the first page of the paper, Ambre Nicolle acknowledges funding from “the European Union's Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 (2014-2020) under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 75388 and from LMU Munich's Institutional Strategy LMUexcellent within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative (No. ZUK22).”

The Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement number indicated is not correct. It should be No. 754388, rather than No. 75388.

We apologize for this error.

Continuous improvement, where production workers suggest incremental process improvements, has become standard practice in modern manufacturing. I consider a simple two-period model where workers produce output and innovate and innovation leads to future job losses. I derive the optimal multitasking contract and show that the principal distorts optimal first period employment downwards to increase the probability of continued employment and reduce first period incentive costs. At high levels of moral hazard, first period employment does not respond to shifts in demand and other parameters. I observe similar distortions at Lincoln Electric and predict that they should be observed more broadly.

When reviewing horizontal mergers, antitrust agencies balance anticompetitive incentives, resulting from market power, with procompetitive incentives, created by efficiencies, assuming complete information and static, simultaneous move Nash equilibrium play. These models miss how a merged firm may prefer not to pass through efficiencies when rivals would respond by lowering their prices. We use an asymmetric information model, where rivals do not observe the size of the realized cost efficiency, to investigate how this incentive could affect post-merger prices. We highlight how the strength of this incentive will depend on the market structure of non-merging rivals and discuss alternative settings where similar issues arise.

We investigate the impact of public procurement on business survival. Using Italy as a laboratory, we construct a large-scale dataset of firms—covering balance-sheet, income-statement, and administrative records—and match it with public contract data. Employing a regression discontinuity design for close-call auctions, we find that winners are more likely to stay in the market than marginal losers after the award and that the boost in survival chances lasts longer than the contract duration. We document that this effect is associated with earnings substitution rather than increased business scale and that survivors experience no productivity premium. Securing contracts relaxes credit constraints and acts as a mechanism for survival.

We study the impact of competitive personalized pricing in a Hotelling duopoly model where consumers can purchase from both firms. We show that the impact crucially depends on the magnitude of the additional utility from consuming the second product. Compared with uniform pricing, personalized pricing benefits both consumers and firms when the additional utility is moderate; but it harms consumers while benefiting firms when the additional utility is large. These results contrast with the existing research on competitive personalized pricing, which assumes that consumers purchase one product only.

We study the effects of partial cross ownership (PCO) among rival firms on their incentives to innovate. PCO in our model gives rise to a price effect due to its effect on price competition and hence on the marginal benefit from investment, as well as a cannibalization effect which arises because each firm internalizes part of the negative externality of its investment on the rival's profit. We show that overall, PCO may benefit or harm consumers depending on the size of the PCO stakes, their degree of symmetry, the size of the innovation, its marginal cost, and whether it is drastic or not.