International Journal of Industrial Organization最新文献

This paper provides empirical evidence suggesting that patents may facilitate knowledge disclosure. The analysis exploits the Invention Secrecy Act, which grants the U.S. Commissioner for Patents the right to prevent the disclosure of new inventions that represent a threat to national security. Using a two-level matching approach, we document a negative and large relationship between the enforcement of a secrecy order and follow-on inventions, as captured with patent citations and text-based measures of invention similarity. The effect carries over to after the lift of the secrecy period, suggesting a lost generation of inventions. The results bear implications for innovation and intellectual property policy.

Modern business practices frequently employ a blend of pricing strategies to segment markets effectively. As a result, consumers may encounter pricing schedules that are nonlinear and multidimensional. This paper presents a structural approach for estimating multidimensional nonlinear pricing models involving multiple decision variables in an energy market. Using a unique, rich panel dataset of Chinese household electricity consumption, we structurally estimate consumer preferences under the influence of an Increasing Block Price (IBP) and a Time-of-Use (ToU) system. Our structural approach allows us to distinguish and evaluate household-level price elasticities of demand, presenting a novel explanation for consumers' feedback on marginal price changes. Through model-based simulations, we demonstrate that a 1% increase in price corresponds to a 0.7% reduction in total electricity demand. However, our analysis indicates that practical opportunities for optimization within multi-dimensional pricing systems are limited. Our findings offer distinct insights into the complex interplay between intricate pricing structures and energy consumption behavior, thereby providing valuable guidance for policymakers and regulators.

Integrating wind power demands more generation fleet flexibility and incurs more incidences of transmission congestion, which may impose a negative effect on how efficiently regional production is allocated among fossil fuel electricity generators (we call it “regional allocative efficiency”). Exploring exogenous variations in wind power generation conditional on wind turbine capacity, we analyze wind-induced allocative efficiency loss by comparing the average cost sensitivity of fossil-fuel generator utilization between periods of different wind generation levels in a US regional electricity market. Results show that the utilization of fossil fuel generators becomes less sensitive to their costs as the share of wind power increases. This effect is more pronounced when wind power is more volatile and when transmission capacity is less sufficient. The back-of-envelope calculation based on our empirical findings suggests that the private inefficiency cost is nontrivial: taking it into account would increase the levelized cost of wind energy by $12/MWh, amounting to approximately 17% of the traditional estimates. Further incorporating the social damage of carbon dioxide in the calculation implies that the privately inefficient substitution from cheap coal to expensive gas units instead brings a net social benefit; nonetheless, our estimated private cost is still policy-relevant since it is a local burden while the carbon abatement benefit is shared globally.

We revisit the (non-)identification of affiliated interdependent-value auctions from the perspective of sequential auctions introduced by Milgrom and Weber (2000). In contrast to static auctions, prices in early rounds affect bidding in later rounds in sequential auctions, generating enough variation for testing interdependent against private values and model identification. We develop nonparametric tests and identification results by exploring the functional dependence of the pseudo values in later rounds on the prices in early rounds. We also discuss applications and extensions of our results, including cases of non-identical goods, observed covariates and unobserved heterogeneity.

It is generally assumed that bigger scale and scope of private antitrust enforcement promotes effective competition. This has motivated several North American and European courts to uphold redress claims not only from clients of a detected cartel but also plaintiffs who were exposed to ‘umbrella pricing’, i.e. equilibrium price increases by non-colluding competitors. The paper shows that the presumed deterrence effects of obliging infringing firms to compensate aggrieved customers of non-infringing firms can be dominated by adverse cartel size effects: liability for umbrella damages primarily constrains small partial cartels. It thereby improves the comparative profitability and stability of large ones. More encompassing cartels can form, prices rise, and welfare falls.

We review the Chicago school's single monopoly profit theory whereby an upstream monopolist cannot increase its profits through vertical integration as it anyway has sufficient market power. In our model the dominant supplier has full bargaining power, uses observable two-part tariffs, and is only constrained by a less efficient source (such as in-house production). We show that, by vertically integrating with a downstream incumbent, the supplier can profitably commit to pricing more aggressively if a downstream entrant refuses its supply contract. This can foreclose the downstream market. The anti-competitive effects arise from the seemingly pro-competitive elimination of double marginalization.

Network effects, i.e., an agent's utility may depend on other agents' choices, appear in many contracting situations. Empirically assessing them faces two challenges: an endogeneity problem in contract choice and a reflection problem in network effects. This paper proposes a nonparametric approach to tackle both challenges by exploiting restriction conditions from both demand and supply sides. We illustrate our methodology in the yellow pages advertising industry. Using advertising purchases and nonlinear price schedules from seven directories in Toronto, we find positive network effects, which account for a substantial portion of the publisher's profit and businesses' surpluses. We finally conduct counterfactuals to assess the overall and distributional welfare effects of the nonlinear pricing scheme relative to an alternative linear pricing scheme with and without network effects.

Consumer switching costs reduce the price elasticity of existing customers while increasing competition for new ones, creating an “invest-and-harvest” incentive for firms. This paper examines the effect of this dual pricing incentive on firm behavior in a laboratory experiment both with and without switching costs and the ability to communicate. I find that switching costs reduce the price level for new consumers, while the price level for existing consumers is unaffected and the “harvesting” effect is comparatively muted. Markets with switching costs are more competitive and less tacitly collusive. Moreover, switching costs provide a focal point for price setting in the form of a minimum marginal cost mark-up, which is frequently chosen in tacit market sharing outcomes. The results have implications for antitrust policy.

We analyze the equilibrium in the credit market when a bank and a lending platform compete to offer credit to borrowers. The platform does not manage deposit accounts, but acts as an intermediary between the borrower and investor, offering a risky contract such that the investor is only reimbursed if the borrower is successful. We show that the platform business model of financial intermediation may generate unexpected effects in the credit market. In particular, investor participation in the platform sometimes decreases when the platform attracts better-quality borrowers. When it competes with the platform, depending on the respective distributions of borrower and investor types, the bank may expand the supply of credit to low-quality borrowers, or restrict it to high-quality borrowers. Bank-platform competition expands the total supply of credit, but has an ambiguous impact on borrower surplus, because some borrowers may have higher repayments.

In markets where buyers have incomplete information about product quality, consumer sophistication strengthens the case for stronger regulation of deceptive advertising by firms. In a model where a fraction of buyers are naive (i.e., cannot update beliefs based on market signals and believe all advertising claims) and they stand to gain from receiving reliable information about product quality, I show that the socially optimal level of penalty is (a) substantially higher than the penalty required to merely avoid deception by firms and (b) increasing in the proportion of sophisticated buyers. The optimal penalty for false advertising not only discourages deception but also reduces prices by eliminating signaling distortion. Moreover, a low level of penalty is worse than no penalty from a social welfare standpoint.