Effects of horizontal consolidation under bilateral imperfect competition between processors and retailers

This article considers bilateral imperfect competition between processors and retailers to estimate the trade off between market power and cost efficiency. The model is based on pricing rules from a firm's profit maximization and nests both oligopoly and oligopsony models. An empirical analysis for US beef processors and retailers suggests that processors tend to exercise oligopsony market power in procuring cattle, but they are unlikely to exercise market power on retailers. When retailers and processors are considered as one integrated sector, efficiency effects from the increased concentration in the US beef packing industry are slightly larger than market power effects. When processors’ market power is considered separately from retailers’ market power, the difference between cost saving and market power effects becomes greater. The cost elasticity estimate, 0.99, indicates that a further merger would result in little economies of scale in the future. Therefore, although we find that efficiency effects are currently larger than market power effects, a further increase in concentration in the US beef processing industry could narrow the gap between the two effects.     

Oligopsony Distortions and Welfare Implications of Trade*

While imperfect competition in the output market has garnered extensive focus in the new trade theory literature, input market imperfection has received considerably less attention. Since market power in input purchase has been growing in recent years, it is worth examining the welfare implications of trade arising from oligopsony power. We develop a model consisting of two final goods, one intermediate good, and two primary factors (capital and labor). One final good and the intermediate good employ primary factors, whereas the other final good uses labor and the intermediate input. All markets operate under perfect competition except for the intermediate input, which is oligopsonistic. Using this model, we show that oligopsony can lead to some anomalies such as an increase in the oligopsony output, reward to the intensive‐factor in the oligopsony sector, national welfare, and deterioration of terms of trade, but it always decreases the reward to the intermediate input.     

R&D, Imperfect Competition and Growth with Human Capital Accumulation

This paper studies the long‐run consequences of imperfect competition on growth and the sectoral distribution of skills within an R&D‐based growth model with human capital accumulation. We find that steady‐state growth is driven only by incentives to accumulate skills. In the model imperfect competition has a positive growth effect, while influencing the allocation of human capital to the different economic activities employing this factor input. Contrary to general wisdom, the share of resources invested in R&D turns out not to be monotonically increasing in the product market power and its correlation with the equilibrium output growth rate is not unambiguous.     

The electricity market game

This paper examines the effects of imperfect competition in unregulated electricity markets from a general equilibrium perspective, and demonstrates that horizontal market power can explain both the large peak-period price spikes observed recently in California and elsewhere, and the marked reduction in addition to capacity that have also occurred during the transition to competitive markets.     

零售商买方势力一定会导致通道费吗？--基于纵向市场结构的合作博弈分析

关于通道费的研究,有一种观点认为通道费是零售商买方势力的体现。但是现实经济中有些具有买方势力的零售商收取通道费,而另一些却不收取通道费,买方势力的观点不能对这一现象作出解释。针对此,构建双边双寡头的纵向市场结构模型,并在模型中引入零售商的价格竞争和服务竞争,在合作博弈的框架下分析研究了零售商买方势力与通道费之间的关系。研究发现买方势力并不是出现通道费的充分条件,而只是必要条件,通道费的出现与否除了与零售商买方势力有关外,还与其他的市场环境因素有关。最后,通过线性需求函数的特例对这一结论进行了验证,并在此基础之上提出了相应的规制政策建议。     

Sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets

Theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run, because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market. In product markets with imperfect competition employes with a taste for discrimination might survive, None the less inthis case long-run efffects are also unclear, unless some monopsonistic power in the labour market is involved. Monopsony in the labour market, on the other hand, has received very little attention in the literature. The paper tries to pick up this long negleted issue, looking at the impact of concentration in output markets and local labour markets on wage discrimination by sex in Austria. As limited workers' mobility enables employers to define their own local labour markets,special attention is given to married women, whose geographical mobility is known to be very low.     

Production, trade, prices, exchange rates and equilibration in large experimental economies

We study market equilibration in laboratory economies that are larger and more complex than any that have been studied experimentally to date. Complexity is derived from the fact that the economies are “international” in economic structure with multiple input, output, and foreign exchange markets in operation. The economies have twenty-one markets and due to the fact that they have roughly fifty agents, the economies are characterized by several hundred equations. In spite of the complexity and interdependence of the economy, the results demonstrate the substantial power of the general equilibrium model of perfect competition to predict the direction of movement of market-level variables. Empirical patterns in the convergence process are explored and described.     

Withholding investments in energy only markets: can contracts make a difference?

Although there are mechanisms to control market power in the spot market, withholding investments can still increase profits and hamper adequate capacity expansion. We examine the effect on investment of one suggested approach to reducing market power, contracting longer term. We construct a stylized model of an energy-only market where two firms, each specializing in one technology, invest in a first stage, contract part of their production in the second stage and sell the rest in the spot market in the third stage. We compare this model to one of an energy-only market having two stages, investment and a spot market. We find cases where the contracts change neither capacity nor peak prices, where the foreclosing effect of one player blocking the other from contracts markets increases investments and reduces prices, and where the opportunity to foreclose the market can incentivize one firm to lower its investment and increase its pricing power to the detriment of consumers. The model relies on the simplest possible assumptions of imperfect competition (subgame perfect equilibria with Cournot agents). We illustrate the different outcomes in a numerical example with two load steps (peak and off-peak) where we change one parameter, the height of the off-peak time segment. We find cases with increased and decreased capacity as well as no change in capacity. Since there is no general characterization of the consequences of contracts in this simple example, there can be no characterization in more complicated models that contain the market structures included here, and regulators or competition authorities cannot rely on contracts to induce sufficient capacity expansion by reducing market power. One other market mechanism that has been proposed to induce investment, a capacity auction with predetermined capacity requirements, is a potential alternative to limit market power that deserves further exploration to determine the extent to which it can provide an adequate incentive to invest in the presence of market power.     

Does entry improve welfare? A general equilibrium approach to competition policy

We consider a simple general equilibrium model with imperfect competition. Firms are price takers in the input market and compete à la Cournot in some or all of the product markets and their technologies display constant returns to scale. We show that an increase in the number of firms in a given sector does not always improve welfare. We also provide a characterization in terms of mark-up rates of the sectors for which entry is welfare enhancing. Our results challenge the common idea that mergers with no cost synergy are not desirable for consumers.     

The welfare cost of imperfect competition and distortionary taxation

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor markets in the United States is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 3.62 percent while it is 0.58 percent in the labor market, taking the transition path from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. If we also take into account that the US economy is characterized by distortionary taxation, the welfare cost of the product market distortion increases to 13.51 percent and the labor market distortion to 4.35 percent.     

Manufacturers and retailers in the global economy

We develop a model with multi‐product retailers acting as intermediaries between manufacturers and consumers. We show that the rise in retailer product assortment, the rise of up‐front payments in many retail markets and the observed shift in employment from manufacturing to retailing may be the consequence of the global integration of product markets. We also identify a novel benefit from market integration consisting of efficiency gains in the vertical distribution chain.     

Substitution and output effects in the neoclassical theory of the firm under imperfect competition

Since 1938, it has been established that the effect produced by a variation in an input price on the use of another input can be decomposed into a substitution effect and an output effect (or scale effect). Nevertheless, this distinction is still denied today by many authors. Here, one tries to establish in which manner imperfect competition in the product market alters the respective importance of substitution and output effects. Some implications are then derived about alternative manners of defining substitutability and complementarity between inputs.     

Limit Theorems for Estimating the Parameters of Differentiated Product Demand Systems

We provide an asymptotic distribution theory for a class of generalized method of moments estimators that arise in the study of differentiated product markets when the number of observations is associated with the number of products within a given market. We allow for three sources of error: sampling error in estimating market shares, simulation error in approximating the shares predicted by the model, and the underlying model error. It is shown that the estimators are CAN provided the size of the consumer sample and the number of simulation draws grow at a large enough rate relative to the number of products. We consider the implications of the results for the Berry, Levinsohn and Pakes (1995) random coefficient logit model and the pure characteristics model analysed in Berry and Pakes (2002) . The required rates differ for these two frequently used demand models. A small Monte Carlo study shows that the differences in asymptotic properties of the two models are reflected, in quite a striking way, in the models' small sample properties. Moreover the limit distributions provide a good approximation to the actual Monte Carlo distribution of the parameter estimates. The results have important implications for the computational burden of the two models.     

Aggregate returns to scale in Greek manufacturing

This paper takes an imperfect competition model of the economy in order to investigate for retuns to scale in Greek manufacturing and examines, through a small-scale macroeconomic model, the implication of estimates. For this purpose a price, wage and demand for output equations are estimated, using annual data for the period 1954–94. Prices come through the profits maximization process and depend on wage, capital rental, demand and a number of other variables denoing technology and market competition. Results are clearly in favour of increasing returns to scale hypothesis, although alternative explanations for the negative demand effect on prices cannot be excluded.     

Competition in gas markets

This paper discusses some of the current regulatory issues that arise in gas markets under perfect or imperfect competition. It first presents a benchmark model of gas transportation pricing, when all markets are competitive. Optimal prices and capacities are characterized both without and with a break-even constraint for the transportation operator. Elaborating on this framework, it then studies the appropriate dimensioning of the transportation network when an otherwise unregulated supplier exerts market power. Specifically, it points to the possibility of building up “excess” transmission capacity in order to mitigate local market power.     

Vertical Relationships between Manufacturers and Retailers: Inference with Limited Data

In this paper, different models of vertical relationships between manufacturers and retailers in the supermarket industry are compared. Demand estimates are used to compute price-cost margins for retailers and manufacturers under different supply models when wholesale prices are not observed. The purpose is to identify the set of margins compatible with the margins obtained from estimates of cost and to select the model most consistent with the data among non-nested competing models. The models considered are (1) a simple linear pricing model; (2) a vertically integrated model; and (3) a variety of alternative (strategic) supply scenarios that allow for collusion, non-linear pricing, and strategic behaviour with respect to private label products. Using data on yogurt sold in several stores in a large urban area of the U.S. the results imply that wholesale prices are close to marginal cost and that retailers have pricing power in the vertical chain. This is consistent with non-linear pricing by the manufacturers or high bargaining power of the retailers.     

General training and oligopsony

I consider a duopsony model of a general skilled labour market. The source of the market power of the firms is the mobility cost of the workers. In the model general training is inefficient and the firms bear a share of the general training cost. If capital market imperfections prevent workers from investing in human capital, the imperfect competition in the skilled labour market compared with the perfect competition promotes general training. In order to remove the inefficiency of personnel training it is necessary to link together a minimum wage for skilled workers and loans to apprentices.     

Prices versus quantities: environmental regulation and imperfect competition

By exercising market power, a firm will distort the production, and therefore the emissions decisions, of all firms in the market. This paper examines how the welfare implications of strategic behavior depend on how pollution is regulated. Under an emissions tax, aggregate emissions do not affect the marginal cost of polluting. In contrast, the price of tradable permits is endogenous. I show when this feedback effect increases strategic firms’ output. Relative to a tax, tradable permits may improve welfare in a market with imperfect competition. As an application, I model strategic and competitive behavior of wholesalers in a Mid-Atlantic electricity market. Simulations suggest that exercising market power decreased emissions locally, thereby substantially reducing the regional tradable permit price. Furthermore, I find that had regulators opted to use a tax instead of permits, the deadweight loss from imperfect competition would have been even greater.     

Upstream Market Power and Wasteful Retailers*

We provide a novel explanation for the wasteful product disposal by retailers. In our model, after purchasing a quantity of a product from the manufacturer, the retailer exerts a costly effort to sell the product to the final users. The manufacturer’s production cost and the outside opportunity associated with it is private information. We show that, when the manufacturer has the upstream market power, the retailer sells all units purchased from the manufacturer. However, when the retailer has the market power, it might deliberately purchase more than it sells to the final users (thus wasting the unsold amount).     

An aggregate model of the Canadian labor market

The paper develops and estimates a small equilibrium model of the Canadian postwar labor market. The framework is imperfect competition in product and labor markets which, we argue, is forced upon us by the empirical fact that real wages do not on their own explain the business cycle. The framework incorporates on the supply side the effects of both unemployment benefits and the terms of trade. These variables, together with demand side effects, are then used to account Canadian unemployment. A pleasing feature of the model is that it is quite econometrically stable over the turbulent '80s.