Journal of Industrial Economics最新文献

We examine how quality competition affects the relationship between market size and industry structure at the product level using evidence from the U.S. hotel industry. Starting in the early 1980s, quality competition for business travelers became more based on variable and less on fixed costs, and became less scale intensive. Since then, market size increases have been met by more, but smaller, hotels in business travel destinations but continued to be met by larger hotels in personal travel destinations. Our results illustrate how the way consumers benefit from increases in market size depends on how firms compete.

We consider exclusive contracts a survival strategy for a local incumbent manufacturer facing a multinational manufacturer's entry. Although both manufacturers prefer to trade with an efficient local distributor, trading with inefficient competitive distributors is acceptable only to the entrant, because of the entrant's efficiency. Hence, such competitive distributors can be an outside option for the entrant. As the entrant becomes efficient, the outside option works effectively, implying that the entry does not considerably benefit the efficient local distributor. Thus, the local manufacturer is more likely to sign an anticompetitive exclusive contract with the efficient distributor as the entrant becomes efficient.

Introduction: The experiment was set to determine the effects of long-term (55-day) use of three commercial prebiotics including Saccharomyces cerevisiae-derived β-glucans and one including inulin on juvenile vimba (Vimba vimba) reared intensively under controlled conditions.

Material and methods: Six-month-old fish were fed commercial feed (Control group, n = 90), or the same feed supplemented with 0.02% Leiber Beta-S (BS group, n = 90), 0.20% Biolex MB40 (MB group, n = 90), 0.30% CeFi (CE group, n = 90) or 1.00% inulin Orafti GR (IN group, n = 90) for 55 days.

Results: In the BS group, the final growth parameters were significantly lower than in the Control group, while the feed conversion ratio was significantly higher. No significant differences were found between any other group and the Control group in the respective parameters. The respiratory burst activity of the head-kidney phagocytes was significantly lower in all fish groups fed the prebiotic-supplemented diets compared to the Control group. The proliferative response of the head-kidney lymphocytes stimulated by concanavalin A was lower in the BS group than in the Control group, while in other groups this response was not affected. No significant differences were found in histopathological analyses of the digestive tract, liver or pancreas.

Conclusion: The long-term supplementation of fish diets with prebiotics can negatively influence the growth, feed conversion, nonspecific cellular resistance and proliferative activity of the T lymphocytes of vimba juveniles.

We perform a Monte Carlo experiment to assess the performance of three hospital merger simulation methods. Our analysis proceeds as follows: (i) specify a theoretical model of hospital markets and use it to generate “true” price effects for many simulated mergers; (ii) for each simulated merger, generate data of the kind commonly available in real-world merger analysis and apply the simulation methods to those data; and (iii) compare the predictions of the simulation methods to the true price effects. All three simulation methods perform reasonably well. We also develop a method for predicting price effects that extends Garmon [2017].

This paper studies firms' data privacy and cybersecurity choices. We emphasise the strategic interdependence between these decisions and demonstrate that security in both the market equilibrium and the social optimum tends to be higher when data is shared. We also identify important market failures in the sense that firms tend to under-invest in security and over-share data. Our welfare analysis of a minimum security standard, disclosure and consumer education policies, liability rules and consumer mitigation strategies highlights the need for a co-ordinated approach to regulation.

We study information flows in an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determines the organization's overall efficiency. Under centralized communication, eliciting the agents' information may induce the principal to manipulate aggregate information, which obstructs an effective use of information. Under hierarchical communication, the principal concedes more information rent due to loss of control, but is able to use the agents' information more effectively. The trade-off between the organizational structures depends on the likelihood that the agents are efficient. Centralized communication is optimal when such likelihood is low. Hierarchical communication, by contrast, is optimal when it is high.

Consider a three-tier industry with a monopolist supplying a manufacturer which sells its product to final consumers through two retailers. Contracts are linear and secret. Hence, upon receiving an out-of-equilibrium offer, each retailer must form a belief about the identity of the deviating upstream firm. This beliefs' specification problem wipes out if an Open Book Accounting (OBA) policy is implemented, whereby the input price is disclosed to retailers. Under Cournot (Bertrand) competition, OBA increases industry profits and consumer surplus if retailers believe that any out-of-equilibrium offer is more likely to reflect a deviation by the upstream supplier (by the manufacturer).

Many industries consist of large firms that compete in multiple geographic markets. Such overlap, defined as multimarket contact (MMC), may facilitate tacit collusion and soften competition. We examine the effects of MMC on health insurance prices and quality using comprehensive data on the Medicare Advantage (MA) market from 2008 through 2015. Our identification strategy exploits two plausibly exogenous changes to MMC: (1) out-of-market mergers; and (2) policy-driven changes in the benchmark rates of other markets. Our results consistently support the mutual forbearance hypothesis, where we find that prices are significantly higher and high-quality plans less pervasive as MMC increases.

The patent system underpins the business model of some of the fastest-growing companies. Used appropriately, it should support frontier technologies and nurture new firms. Used perniciously, it can stifle innovation and protect established technological behemoths. We analyze patent examination decisions at the American, European, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese patent offices and find evidence that patent attorneys have a surprisingly significant role in the patent system. Our results suggest that some forces within the examination system maintain the uneven playing field by allocating monopoly rights to inventors with better access to influential attorneys, rather than leveling it by favoring inventors with better, nonobvious ideas. Attorney quality is most important, vis-à-vis invention quality, in less codified and more rapidly changing technology areas such as software and ICT.

This paper considers an entry game in which an incumbent firm operates in a number of markets and a potential entrant can enter multiple or all of the markets. While price discrimination has usually been thought of as a barrier to entry, in our model it is not and instead, charging a uniform price across the markets can discourage entry. Partial entry occurs when the two firms' products are highly substitutable. In this case, uniform pricing raises the profits of both the incumbent and the entrant but reduces consumer and total welfare relative to price discrimination.