International Journal of Industrial Organization最新文献

This paper provides an introduction to and overview of the mechanism design approach to textbook monopoly and monopsony pricing problems. Specifically, assuming that agents are privately informed about their values and costs, it shows that the optimal selling and procurement mechanisms quite generally involve rationing, provided the underlying mechanism design problem does not satisfy the regularity assumption of Myerson (1981). Rationing takes the form of underpricing in the case of a monopoly seller and of involuntary unemployment and efficiency wages in the case of a monopsony employer. The paper illustrates these phenomena, as well as the effects of price ceilings and minimum wages, with a leading example that permits closed-form solutions. It also explains why resale tends to undermine the firm's benefits from rationing without eliminating them and discusses emerging issues for the theory of regulation.

This paper investigates the efficiency impact of garage ownership frictions in the procurement of public bus transportation services in London. In this market, operators are less competitive for routes far from their garages, leading to local monopoly rents. Empty bus travel between garages and routes (dead miles) is found to account for about 13 percent of driving time in this market. Consequentially, sizeable effects of dead mile minutes on bids and procurement costs are estimated. Taking the urban context and the demand side as given, and treating this market as a typical network industry, counterfactual simulations evaluate the effect of unbundling the ownership of bus garages from the operation of the bus routes. Letting a central dispatcher allocate buses to garages would reduce total dead miles by 14 percent, with corresponding reductions of operating costs and of polluting exhaust emissions.

This paper examines the determinants of public procurement prices using comprehensive data on pharmaceutical purchases by the public sector in Chile. We first document sizable price differences between buyers for the same product and quantity purchased: the difference between the average prices paid by buyers at the 90th and 10th percentiles of the distribution is 16 percent. Our main results are related to the importance of market structure in explaining the dispersion in procurement prices. We find that market structure explains three times more dispersion than buyer effects. Moreover, we leverage exogenous variation in market structure due to patent expirations to estimate that the entry of an additional seller decreases average procurement prices by 11.7 percent, which is 72 percent of the price differences implied by the gap between the 90th and 10th percentiles of estimated buyer effects. These results suggest that supply-side factors are relevant determinants of public procurement prices and that their quantitative importance may exceed that of demand-side factors previously emphasized in the literature.

We provide an in-depth study of short-term rental (STR) regulation in Chicago. While many municipalities choose between outright bans or laissez-faire strategies concerning STR activities, Chicago pioneered a middle-ground ordinance, enabling the market to exist with limitations and registrations, and imposing a new tax. We show that compared to three control cities, the number of active Airbnb listings in Chicago declined 16.4% in the two years after the ordinance, but this effect is only significant after the city began receiving detailed data feeds from STR platforms. We further demonstrate (i) localized reductions in burglaries near buildings that prohibit STR listings as part of a new capability of the ordinance, (ii) Airbnb revenues declined more in zip codes with above-median hotel revenues, and (iii) Chicago's middle ground approach generated different and nuanced effects on different STR stakeholders, including the city itself in terms of its STR tax revenues.

I study a model in which two upstream firms compete to supply a homogeneous input to two downstream firms selling differentiated products. Upstream firms offer exclusive, discriminatory, public, two-part tariff contracts to the downstream firms. I show that, under very general conditions, this game does not have a pure-strategy subgame-perfect equilibrium. The intuition is that variable parts in such an equilibrium would have to be pairwise-stable; however, with pairwise-stable variable parts, downstream competitive externalities are not internalized, implying that upstream firms can profitably deviate. I contrast this non-existence result with earlier papers that found equilibria in related models.