Asymmetric Information and Adverse Selection in Mauritian Slave Auctions

Information asymmetry is a necessary prerequisite for testing adverse selection. This paper applies this sequence of tests to Mauritian slave auctions. The theory of dynamic auctions with private and common values suggests that when an informed participant is known to be active, uninformed bidders will be more aggressive and the selling price will be higher. We conjecture that observable family links between buyer and seller entailed superior information and find a strong price premium when a related buyer purchased a slave, indicative of information asymmetry. We then test for adverse selection using sale motivation. Our results indicate large discounts on voluntary as compared to involuntary sales. Consistent with adverse selection, the market anticipated that predominantly low-productivity slaves would be brought to the market in voluntary sales.     

Pricing to Firm: an Analysis of Firm‐ and Product‐level Import Prices*

We use Hungarian Customs data on product‐level imports of manufacturing firms to document that the import price of a particular product varies substantially across buying firms. We relate the level of import prices to firm characteristics such as size, foreign ownership, and market power. We develop a theory of “pricing to firm” (PTF), where markups depend on the technology and competitive environment of the buyer. The predictions of the model are confirmed by the data: import prices are higher for firms with greater market power, and for more essential intermediate inputs (with a high share in material costs). We take account of the endogeneity of the buyer’s market power with respect to higher import prices and unobserved cost heterogeneity within product categories. The magnitude of PTF is big: the standard deviation of price predicted by PTF is 21.5%.     

DIRECTED SEARCH,COORDINATION FAILURE,AND SELLER PROFITS: AN EXPERIMENTAL COMPARISON OF POSTED PRICING WITH SINGLE AND MULTIPLE PRICES

We experimentally examine posted pricing and directed search. In one treatment, capacity‐constrained sellers post fixed prices, which buyers observe before choosing whom to visit. In the other, firms post both “single‐buyer” (applied when one buyer visits) and “multibuyer” (when multiple buyers visit) prices. We find, based on a 2 × 2 (two buyers and two sellers) market and a follow‐up experiment with 3 and 2 × 3 markets, that multibuyer prices can be lower than single‐buyer prices or prices in the one‐price treatment. Also, allowing the multibuyer price does not affect seller profits and increases market frictions.     

Seller competition by mechanism design

This paper analyzes a market game in which sellers offer trading mechanisms to buyers and buyers decide which seller to go to depending on the trading mechanisms offered. In a (subgame perfect) equilibrium of this market, sellers hold auctions with an efficient reserve price but charge an entry fee. The entry fee depends on the number of buyers and sellers, the distribution of buyer valuations, and the buyer cost of entering the market. As the size of the market increases, the entry fee decreases and converges to zero in the limit. We study how the surplus of buyers and sellers depends on the number of agents on each side of the market in this decentralized trading environment.     

Mix‐and‐match divestitures and merger harm

We consider the effects of a merger combined with a divestiture that mixes and matches the assets of the two pre‐merger suppliers into one higher‐cost and one lower‐cost post‐merger supplier. Such mix‐and‐match transactions leave the number of suppliers in a market unchanged but, as we show, can be procompetitive or anticompetitive depending on whether buyers are powerful and on the extent of outside competition. A powerful buyer can benefit from a divestiture that creates a lower‐cost supplier, even if it causes the second‐lowest cost to increase. In contrast, a buyer without power is always harmed by a weakening of the competitive constraint on the lowest‐cost supplier.     

A Model of Shareholder Discounts

Many companies supplying consumption goods and services provide their shareholders with price discounts. This paper presents a simple model describing shareholder discounts and consequent market equilibrium. It is found that shareholder discounts resemble many features of two-part tariffs. The welfare analysis shows that the equilibrium outcomes with shareholder discounts are Pareto inefficient. Compared with uniform pricing, shareholder discounts unambiguously increase major shareholders' wealth but their effects on consumers and society are generally ambiguous.     

Optimal mechanism design with resale via bargaining

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully characterize an optimal mechanism under general conditions. Surprisingly, in this optimal mechanism, the seller never allocates the object to the regular buyer regardless of his bargaining power in the resale market. The seller sells only to the publicly known buyer, and reveals no additional information to the resale market. The possibility of resale causes the seller to sometimes hold back the object, which under our setup is never optimal if resale is prohibited. We find that the seller?s revenue is increasing in the publicly known buyer?s bargaining power in the resale market. When the publicly known buyer has full bargaining power, Myerson?s optimal revenue is achieved; when the publicly known buyer has no bargaining power, a conditionally efficient mechanism prevails.     

Buyer and/or seller power? An application to the Brazilian milk market

Despite its importance, the co-existence of buyer and seller power has been largely neglected in the empirical literature. In this article, we develop a stochastic frontier model to measure channel market power as deviations from a perfectly competitive frontier and decompose it into buyer and seller power. We provide an empirical illustration using milk data from five Brazilian states and find that channel market power ranges between 4% and 12% of the wholesale price, but that 75% of the market power is accounted for by retail buyer power. The methodology proposed can provide a rapid assessment of the degree of market power in other markets and a method for separating out buyer and seller power in the market channel.     

Price and information disclosure in the private art market: A signalling game

In this paper, we model private art market agents’ strategic interactions in presence of two types of asymmetric information, about artwork quality and buyer’s knowledge, assuming the seller does not know how informed is the buyer while the buyer does not know the quality of the artwork before purchase. If the seller can choose either a high or a low price and the buyer can signal his type to the seller, we identify the conditions for both equilibria with pooling buyer signalling strategy and with separating strategy, as well as conditions for equilibria where the seller fixes the price according to the actual quality and where he posts prices trying to take advantage of buyer’s limited information. Finally, we identify the condition for the emergence of a “counter-lemon” result, where low-quality artworks and uninformed collectors exit the market, suggesting that seller uncertainty does not directly benefit the buyers, but it can impact the quality traded in the market.     

浅析企业如何合理运用商业折扣与现金折扣

在市场竞争激烈情况下，赊销已成为企业的一种重要的促销手段。有效的赊销政策，不仅能加强企业与各商家及消费者的感情沟通，提升品牌的知名度及销售量，还可以调整市场的供求关系，优化营销网络。如果赊销政策策划不严密，会出现企业资金周转不灵、客户拖欠货款的现象出现。这就要求企业管理部门系统评估赊销决策，要多角度考虑问题，以规范企业赊销活动。文章重点分析了商业折扣和现金折扣的税务处理与筹划，简述了现金折扣的计算与会计核算。     

Analysing Firm‐level Price Effects for Differentiated Products: The Case of Australian Wine Producers

The paper discusses and illustrates estimation methods for identifying and modelling the influence of producers on the prices for a differentiated product. A two‐step fixed effects approach is contrasted to the random effects specification. The techniques are employed to analyse prices for over 260 Australian premium wine producers. The fixed effects specification is preferred given significant correlation between wine attributes and random producer effects. The estimation of fixed producer price effects identifies statistically significant price premiums and discounts, which average 15%. Fixed producer price effects are estimated to depend on the quality reputation of the producer, its level of experience, producer size and the use of multibrands by conglomerates. In part, results indicate that price discounts are associated with producers who have low‐quality reputations, are small and recently established.     

MONEY HOLDINGS,INFLATION, AND WELFARE IN A COMPETITIVE MARKET*

This article examines an environment where money is essential and agents exchange in perfectly competitive, Walrasian markets. Agents consume and produce a homogeneous good, but hold money to purchase consumption in the event of a relatively low productivity shock. A Walrasian market delivers a nondegenerate distribution of money holdings across agents and avoids some of the computational difficulties associated with the market assumption of bilateral bargaining common to search‐theoretic environments. The model is calibrated to long‐run U.S. velocity, and the welfare costs of inflation are assessed for variable buyer–seller ratios and persistent states of buying and selling.     

SEARCH,ADVERSE SELECTION,AND MARKET CLEARING

We examine a dynamic decentralized trading model with infinitesimal sellers and buyers to investigate whether or not the market fails to clear in the limit of search friction vanishing. A seller, who has private information about product quality, and a buyer are matched to bargain over price. They form a long‐term relationship if they reach agreement. They return to the matching pool if they fail to agree or the existing relationship is dissolved. The market fails to clear if and only if the ratio of agents' patience over the dissolution rate exceeds a threshold.     

Non‐Linear Pricing and Price Indexes: Evidence and Implications from Scanner Data

Non‐linear pricing, the fact that prices do not necessarily change in proportion to size, is a ubiquitous phenomenon. However, it has been neither particularly well understood nor well measured. Non‐linear pricing is of practical importance for statistical agencies who, in constructing price indexes, are often required to compare the relative price of a product‐variety of two different sizes. It is usually assumed that prices change one‐for‐one with package and pack size (e.g. a 1‐liter cola costs half as much as a 2‐liter bottle). We question the wisdom of such an assumption and outline a model to flexibly estimate the price‐size function. Applying our model to a large U.S. scanner dataset for carbonated beverages, at a disaggregated level, we find very significant discounts for larger‐sized products. This highlights the need to pursue methods such as those advocated in this paper.     

STRATEGIC ADVERTISING AND DIRECTED SEARCH

Imperfect observability and costly informative advertising are introduced into a standard directed search framework. Capacity‐constrained sellers send costly advertisements to direct buyers' uncoordinated search by specifying their location and terms of trade. We show that the equilibrium advertising intensity is nonmonotonic in the buyer–seller ratio. In addition, we also find that price posting dominates auctions since both mechanisms yield the same expected revenue, but the latter results in higher advertising expense. Finally, we find a positive comovement between market transparency and price for low market tightness when the measure of informed buyers is endogenous.     

Intertemporal pricing in laboratory posted offer markets with differential information

Summary. This paper analyzes intertemporal seller pricing and buyer purchasing behavior in a laboratory retail market with differential information. A seller posts one price each period that a buyer either accepts or rejects. Trade occurs over a sequence of "market periods" with a random termination date. The buyer and seller are differentially informed: The seller's cost of producing a unit of a fictitious good is known and constant in all periods, but the buyer's value for the good (demand) is a random variable governed by a Markov Process whose structure is common knowledge. At the beginning of each period the unit's value is determined by "nature" and is privately revealed only to the buyer. The market termination rule is a binary random variable. We conduct 32 laboratory experiments designed to study intertemporal pricing by human subjects in the Posted Offer Institution when demand follows a stochastic process. There are four series of experiments: 8 with simulated buyers, 8 with inexperienced subjects, 8 with once experienced subjects, and 8 with twice experienced subjects.     

Identification of Dynamic Models of Rewards Programme

“Frequent‐buyer” rewards programmes are commonly used by companies as a marketing tool to compete for market share. They provide a unique environment for studying consumers’ forward‐looking behaviour. The consumer's problem on accumulating reward points can be formulated as a stationary infinite horizon discrete choice dynamic programming model. We show that the parameters of this model, including the discount factor, are well‐identified. In particular, it is possible to identify state‐dependent discount factors (i.e. discount factors can vary with the number of reward points). We discuss how this identification result is related to the goal‐gradient hypothesis studied in the consumer psychology literature.     

买方抗衡势力对上游企业技术创新的影响——基于规模以上工业企业的实证分析

在考虑上游市场结构的情况下,利用2002年、2007年和2012年中国规模以上工业企业的行业面板数据,利用投入产出表中的直接消耗系数构造下游市场势力变量,通过构建计量模型从行业层面考察了买方抗衡势力对上游企业技术创新投入的影响,并讨论了该影响在不同行业的差异。所得结论如下:从整体回归结果来看,买方抗衡势力对上游企业的技术创新有促进作用;从分行业回归结果来看,买方抗衡势力对采矿业企业、轻纺制造业企业和机械电子业企业的技术创新有负向影响,对资源加工业企业的技术创新有正向影响,对公共生产服务业企业技术创新的影响不显著。     

Farmers,Middlemen and Exporters: A Model of Market Power,Pricing and Welfare in a Vertical Supply Chain

Markets for cash‐crops in developing countries are typically characterized by a concentration of buyer power at different levels of the supply chain. For instance, small‐scale coffee farmers sell their produce to a middleman, who in turn sells the coffee onward to an exporter, often a foreign multinational, with monopsony power in the hands of the purchasers at both levels. We analyze pricing behavior and welfare with different assumptions regarding market power. In particular, we show that a more powerful exporter is likely to benefit the producers and may even lead to higher welfare for the producer country as a whole.     

DURABLE-GOODS MONOPOLY WITH MAINTENANCE

A two‐period durable‐goods monopoly product model with a competitive maintenance market is examined. Three types of monopoly solutions are calculated and contrasted to the social optimum: rentals, committed sales and uncommitted sales. Among other things, it is shown that contrary to the conventional wisdom a seller with committed power does not wish to commit ‘to act like a renter’ when maintenance is performed by buyers. This is due to the different objective functions of the buyer and seller. Furthermore, unlike earlier works, it is shown that the socially optimal amount of maintenance/repair does not occur in any sales case.