Journal of Industrial Economics最新文献

We consider an infinitely repeated platform competition in a market with network externalities. The platform that dominated the market in the previous period becomes the incumbent in the current period. We examine the effect of an antitrust policy that prohibits both platforms (symmetric regulation), or just the incumbent (asymmetric regulation) from charging predatory prices. We show that symmetric regulation decreases consumer surplus and does not affect efficiency. Asymmetric regulation increases consumer surplus and improves welfare when the size of the market remains constant over time. Yet, when market size varies over time, this policy may lead to inefficient entry.

We provide a novel theory of harm for resale price maintenance (RPM). In a model with two manufacturers and two retailers, we show that RPM facilitates manufacturer collusion when retailers have alternatives to selling a manufacturer's product. Because of the alternatives, manufacturers can only ensure that retailers sell their products by leaving sufficient retail margins. This restricts the wholesale price level even when the manufacturers collude. RPM allows colluding manufacturers to establish higher prices.

We investigate how the presence of a Data Broker (DB), who sells consumer data to downstream firms, affects firm entry and competition in a horizontally differentiated oligopoly market, in which data allow firms to price discriminate. The DB chooses the price and amount of data sold to each firm. We show that the data sale by the DB reduces excessive market entry, as the competition induced by personalized prices exerts a downward pressure on prices and profits. The data-induced entry barrier and resulting weakened competition dominates the pro-competitive effect of personalized prices. Consequently, while the DB's presence might alleviate excessive market entry, it also diminishes consumer surplus.

This paper investigates the formation of teams in a contest. A manager sorts four workers—who differ in their productivity—into two teams. Workers on each team join forces to produce team output, and one team wins a prize; for example, a bonus package. Two sorting patterns are possible: Positive sorting requires that each team consist of players of same caliber and negative sorting the opposite. We characterize the optimum. We further extend the model to allow the manager to set a prize schedule for the workers on each team upon a win, allocate productive resources between teams, and pick the level of competition of the contest.

How does a monopsonist incentivize its supplier to innovate? By decreasing the short-run profit of the supplier, the monopsonist can increase the supplier's incentive to invest in R&D by lessening the supplier's Arrow's replacement effect. The monopsonist engages in this practice despite a distortion in its trade volume with the supplier that causes inefficiency. We discuss implications for the boundaries of the firm.

We investigate how common ownership affects welfare in a vertically related market. Although common ownership mitigates the double marginalization problem and improves welfare, it restricts competition among downstream firms and harms welfare. We find that whether common ownership is welfare-improving depends on the degree of competitiveness in the downstream market. Common ownership is more likely to improve welfare when there are fewer downstream firms and a greater degree of product differentiation. In other words, common ownership may improve welfare when competition in the downstream market is weak.

Internet users often surf multiple websites as a bundle to fulfill their needs and ‘pay’ for the content by viewing ads. We study how such complementary websites choose advertising policies. Two forces distort the equilibrium away from the industry optimum and the efficient outcome. First, websites place too many ads (double marginalization). Second, given the total advertising volume at equilibrium, websites misallocate ads among themselves (misplacement). Competition in one market segment may eliminate double marginalization but exacerbate misplacement. Introducing micropayments removes misplacement, but the welfare consequences are ambiguous. Policymakers must thus be cautious when applying standard remedies to zero-price markets.

What is the effect on the demand for both discounted and nondiscounted products, when promotional material informs shoppers that some product categories feature discounts? We address this question by conducting a field experiment on a website for online grocery shopping. We find that shoppers who had purchased in a certain food category prior to the experiment responded to noisy promotional information by purchasing items in the discounted category that they had already purchased in the past, regardless of whether the item purchased was currently discounted. Our results suggest that coarse information on discounts increases both consumer spending and seller revenue.

We examine merging firms' additions and removals of products for a sample of 66 mergers across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by merging firms. Merging firms tend to both drop and add products at the periphery of their joint product portfolios, with the net effect of increasing within-firm product similarity. These results are consistent with theories of the firm that emphasize cost synergies among similar types of products or managerial core competencies linked to particular segments of the product market.

An ecosystem comprises all downstream products that employ a certain upstream input. In many cases, final consumers make irreversible investments to join an ecosystem before downstream prices are set. By committing to buy products that use the specific ecosystem input, they are at risk of being held-up. Unable to observe future prices, consumers base their decisions on what they observe about the market structure within each ecosystem, including vertical contracts signed by the upstream firms. By entering into vertical agreements with multiple competing downstream firms, thus creating a credible expectation of lower prices, an upstream firm is able to mitigate consumers' hold-up problem and, as a result, increase ecosystem demand. Our main observation is that, in contrast to conventional wisdom, an upstream monopolist merging with one of its downstream affiliates will find it profitable to continue to serve downstream competitors, even when products sold downstream are homogeneous.