Journal of Industrial Economics最新文献

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.

We theoretically derive an optimal price for a bundle of two goods that are sold in advance to risk-averse buyers. The theory predicts that a round-trip ticket is less expensive than two one-way tickets when demands for the outbound and the inbound are uncertain and positively correlated. Using a unique airlines dataset, we find evidence that is consistent with the theory; round-trip bundle discounts exist and they are larger for passengers who buy early in advance, stay on a Saturday night, and have higher valuations. We also find that the bundle discounts decrease with competition.

According to Hu et al. [Journal of Industrial Economics, 70(3), pp. 775–789], downstream cross-holdings are permissible based on the social welfare standard if the investment technology in the upstream sector is highly inefficient. However, the conclusion of that paper relies on a definition of downstream producer surplus that is not so commonly found in the literature. After using a more commonly found definition of downstream producer surplus, this note demonstrates that downstream cross-holdings have detrimental impacts on both consumer surplus and social welfare, emphasizing the need for efficient and effective regulations on downstream cross-holdings in Hu et al. [Journal of Industrial Economics, 70(3), pp. 775–789] type economy.

Overlapping ownership has gained considerable momentum in the last decades, yet little is known about the role of its sources. We quantify the relative importance of common-ownership (by shareholders external to an industry) and cross-ownership (by firms within the industry). We focus on the global automobile industry, over the period 2007–2021, and document that common-ownership links constitute between 31% and 39% of the equity ownership of automobile manufacturers, while cross-ownership links amount to 6%–9%. We show that not accounting for these relatively modest cross-ownership links has important implications: it can increase the average weight assigned by managers to the profit of competitors by between 33% and 68%.

We study two-player R&D contest design using both an information disclosure policy and a quality standard as instruments. The ability of an innovator is known only to himself. The organizer commits ex-ante to a minimum quality standard and whether to have innovators' abilities publicly revealed before they conduct R&D activities. We find that without quality standards, fully concealing innovators' abilities elicits both higher expected aggregate quality and expected highest quality. With optimally set quality standards, although fully concealing ability information still elicits higher expected aggregate quality, fully disclosing this information leads to a higher level of expected highest quality. Moreover, the optimal quality standards are compared across different objectives and disclosure policies.

The exclusionary theory of price squeezes, commonly debated in courts and among legal scholars, faces significant challenges. This paper introduces an exploitative rationale for price squeezes. A vertically integrated firm can exploit efficiency gains from a downstream competitor, thereby earning more than the monopoly profit, and price squeezing emerges as a necessary condition for such exploitation. Prohibiting price squeezes benefits the competitor and improves production efficiency, but may also lead to unintended, perverse effects. This paper lays an economic foundation for analyzing price squeeze cases and contributes to reconciling the divergence in the case laws between the United States and the European Union.

A manufacturer of an established product repeatedly interacts with a retailer that can sell an inferior new product thereby improving it. The manufacturer's exclusionary strategy consists of a permanently below-cost wholesale price and “vertical collusion” with the retailer to exclude via a future reward of a reduced fixed fee. The latter tool is available only in an infinite game. Although contracts include fixed fees, the retailer sells the new product more than what maximizes industry profits. Exclusive dealing or a vertical merger between the manufacturer of the established product and the retailer replicate the vertically integrated outcome and increase prices.

This paper considers an infinitely repeated competition between manufacturer-retailer supply chains. In every period, retailers privately observe the demand and manufacturers pay retailers ‘information rents’. I study collusive equilibria between the supply chains that may or may not involve the retailers. I find that including forward-looking retailers in the collusive scheme may facilitate or hinder collusion, depending on the likelihood of a high demand and the gap between a high and a low demand. Moreover, collusion on monopoly profits can be easier or more difficult to implement than collusion on upstream profits.

This article investigates the incentive and ability of a platform to limit the extent of competition between the sellers it hosts. Absent contractual restrictions, a platform has an incentive to ensure competition between the sellers. This incentive can change with the introduction of so-called platform most-favored nation clauses (PMFN) that require the online sellers not to offer better conditions on other distribution channels. Such clauses can align the interests between sellers and platforms to restrict competition. I illustrate that a platform can stabilize seller collusion to its own benefit. These results offer a novel rationale to treat PMFNs with scrutiny.