INTERNATIONAL GOVERNANCE OF THE INTERNET: AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS

Economists have long recognised that government may serve as a vehicle to create and maintain monopoly power and hence generate economic rents for a favoured few. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has a government-provided monopoly of the allocation of top-level domains (TLDs) on the A-root server and so generates economic rents. The A-root server is the only computer network that links registered TLDs to the Internet. This paper uses insights of the economics of regulation and rent seeking to explain how existing technology may bypass ICANN and thus restore a competitive market in domain names.     

产权住房选择性供给支持中的激励规制风险研究

在经济适用住房的供给中,政府通过土地划拨、价格规制等方式选择性支持中低收入人群解决住房问题。在拓展垄断产品供给的激励规制模型下,构建经济适用住房供给支持的激励规制模型,分析存在信息偏在和规制俘获情况下的政府激励规制风险。同时,给出最佳规制情况下政府为弥合信息偏在风险所支付的信息租金、高成本企业效率损失租金以及政府为维护社会公平风险所支付的公平租金,并基于此探讨我国经济适用住房政策未来的改革方向。     

Rent seeking and the value of time

This paper focuses on the question of how rivals’ rent-seeking expenditures and investment expenditures are affected by the temporal dimension of those cash flows as well as the timing of the cash flow of monopoly rents. The paper applies methods from statistical reliability theory to derive five propositions establishing the conditions that must be satisfied if the rivals apportion their rent seeking and investment expenditures to maximize their certainty equivalents of the monopoly rent. The propositions explicate the responses of the rivals to changes in economic parameters characterizing the rent-seeking contest such as a change in the duration of the monopoly rent cash flow or a change in the number of rivals.     

Risk,rent seeking and the social cost of monopoly power

Some recent empirical studies that have estimated the social cost of monopoly power have included in these estimates observed monopoly rents as a proxy for the unobserved value of the resources expended by rent seekers. This has involved adding these estimates of resources wasted by rent seekers to estimates of deadweight welfare loss triangles so as to produce an overall estimate of the social cost of monopoly. The present paper points out that each firm seeking a monopoly rent flow not only may be uncertain about obtaining the flow but also about retaining it in future periods. It is shown that this is likely to cause the proportion of the rent flow converted into social cost to be well below 100% regardless of whether the rent sought is small relative to initial wealth and regardless of whether rent seekers are risk-neutral or risk-averse. These findings demonstrate that large errors are likely to be made in monopoly welfare loss studies if observed monopoly rents continue to be employed as a measure of the value of resources used in rent-seeking activities.     

Manager‐Union Bargaining Agenda Under Monopoly and with Network Effects

This paper investigates the bargaining agenda selection in a unionised monopoly with managerial delegation (MD). In contrast to the conventional wisdom, monopoly profits with MD under sequential Efficient Bargaining (SEB) exceed those under Right‐to‐Manage (RTM), while the union can prefer RTM to SEB: paradoxically, a conflict of interests between the parties may still exist but for reversed choices of the agenda. Consumption externalities change the picture. The monopolist still prefers SEB; however, provided that network effects are sufficiently strong, the union prefers SEB even for a relatively low bargaining power. Thus, the parties endogenously choose the SEB agenda which is also Pareto‐superior. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

公用事业产品定价的市场机制与政府规制

城市公用事业是典型的垄断性产业,通过城市公用事业地域与网络垄断性、外部性、公益与营利双重性分析,论证了政府价格规制之必要。其次分析了以新古典经济学和凯恩斯经济学作为逻辑理论基础的西方国家城市公用事业价格规制,及其逐步形成的公共利益理论、俘获理论、寻租理论以及放松规制乃至取消规制的演化过程。最后深入剖析我国城市公用事业存在的规制单一、价格倒逼、补偿缺位,监管虚设等问题,继而提出了强化市场定价、设计经济杠杆、完善社会监督、加强政府监管、构建价格体系等政策建议,以期实现政府规制与市场化融合,提升规制的公平、公正与效能。     

City of Rents: The limits to the Barcelona model of urban competitiveness

The turn towards the knowledge‐based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey's writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge‐based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit‐maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.     

The role of property rights in the positive theory of monopoly

The traditional approach to monopoly posits a dead-weight loss, a classic inefficiency, wherever market power is discovered. Critics such as Joseph Schumpeter argue that such dead-weight losses are inconsequential in a dynamic setting, where long-run trade-offs are said to dominate them with postive sum gains, which are also claimed to flow from market power. Yet further examination reveals that even the static monopoly argument showing Pareto inefficiency is not due to a positive analysis but is an outcome determined by the normative interpretation of the monopolist's property rights. The costs which a firm possessing market power has in expanding its output are not considered as legitimate for inclusion in our analysis. (In other markets, traders are sometimes allowed to collect such rents without being labeled as inefficient—for instance, in the labor market.) The interesting questions become: Why have economists adopted this particular normative view of property rights? Is public policy thereby well served?     

The Nature of Corruption Deterrence in a Competitive Media Sector

This paper compares the deterrence provided by a competitive media sector towards government induced corruption with that of a media monopoly in a setting where the media might raise both true as well as false allegations of corruption. It finds that competition’s impact on corruption deterrence is not necessarily better than a monopoly but rather hinges on a delicate balance between government’s kickback from corruption and the media’s potential benefit from exposure. While the paper does identify conditions in which a competitive media sector would improve upon the deterrence provided by a monopoly, it also find conditions under which it would do no better than a monopoly and in some situations its strategic response could be even worse especially when it intensifies effort towards justifying false allegations.     

The greening of the EC agrochemical market: Regulation and competition

This paper analyses the process of harmonisation of national pesticides regulations in the EC. One of the outcomes of this process was, in 1991, the adoption of an EC regulation which includes new environmental requirements for pesticides to be sold on the EC market. This regulatory process shows an example of trade-off between competition policy and environmental policy. After having described the competition in the agrochemical sector, the paper examines this trade-off in two ways. Firstly, the behaviour of industrial interest groups throughout the process and their influence in the devising of the regulation is considered. Secondly, the impact of competitive issues on the implementation of part of the 1991 regulation (i.e. the re-registration of old pesticides commercialised in the EC) is analysed. This case study confirms some general results of the regulatory capture theory but it also points out some limits of these theories: firms seemed to be much more sensitive to negative pay-offs than to positive ones when deciding to become involved in this regulatory process. A second insight brought up by this case study concerns the link between competition policy and environmental policy and its influence on the efficiency of the latter. Environment-competition trade-off in the agrochemical sector confronts the regulator, when it adopts environmental policy, with two risks: a risk of changing the structure of the industry (from a differentiated and innovative one to a commodity one) if the regulator does not provide sufficient pay-offs for environmental R&D costs, or a risk of allowing part of the industry to increase monopoly rents. Both risks would affect environmental efficiency, either by reducing the innovation in the sector or by over-protecting ‘greener’ pesticides from competition on price.     

The role of management and trade union leadership on dual commitment: The mediating effect of the workplace relations climate

This article examines the effect of transformational and laisser‐faire leadership on the part of local union leaders and immediate supervisors on the dual commitment of unionised workers. Building on the social information processing perspective, it is suggested that these leadership styles are linked to commitment through the workplace relations climate (WRC). Based on a sample of 834 unionised workers, our results suggest that WRC represents an important mechanism explaining the effect of the immediate supervisor's leadership in unionised settings. Results also show that transformational leadership on the part of union representatives is positively linked to union and organisational commitment. This article contributes to the WRC and dual commitment literatures by going beyond structural and institutional explanations and considering relational and actor‐related variables, such as leadership styles.     

Economic rents and mutual fund performance: An empirical investigation

We investigate the monthly returns of 377 open-end mutual funds during the September 1981–1994 period to learn whether economic rents can be garnered through the judicious selection of the advertising and sales method in the mutual fund industry. Specifically, we seek to learn whether direct sales or mass marketing produces economic rents under the assumption that those rents would be passed on to consumers to build a “high quality” image to differentiate the product line. Results suggest that no-load funds produce superior net returns except in the aggressive growth category.     

Surprofits et rentes foncières dans la ville capitaliste

In the capitalist city, ground rents reflect for capital the image of its own development and uneven growth, by imposing upon each particular capital the laws of capital as a whole. Therefore, landed property and rent are neither the regulators of urbanization, nor the source of urban contradictions. Capitalist relations of production imply in themselves the autonomy of private poles of accumulation and deny the possibility of a real social control over the formation of the useful effects of agglomeration. These effects thus necessarily constitute for particular capitals non-reproducible or unevenly preconstituted conditions, and consequently so is the basis of surplus profits which can be transformed into ground rents. The existence of strictly non-reproducible conditions is the foundation of the transformation of branch surplus profits into absolute rent, the unevenly preconstituted conditions inducing differential surplus profits transformable into differential rent. It is the non-reproducibility of the commodity itself which is at the basis of surplus profits and monopoly rents. The transformation of these surplus profits into rents in no way implies the existence of a class of landowners, but only relations of production in which landed property is not only autonomous from capital, but also includes a social content which as such can put up an effective resistance to it. The basis of this resistance can as well be capitalist landed property as various forms of non-capitalist landed property.     

Regulating a Manager‐controlled Natural Monopoly with Unknown Costs

We study the regulation of a manager‐controlled natural monopoly with unknown costs, borrowing from Baron and Myerson (BM) (1982), where the monopoly is controlled by the owner. We consider the case where the regulator can tax the owner as well as the case where she cannot. We find that the optimal price schedule generally lies below the one in the BM model and that it can be as low as the marginal cost if the compensation parameter is sufficiently small and the regulator cannot tax the monopoly owner. We also identify the cases where the monopoly owner prefers to delegate the control to a manager. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

THE NORTH AMERICAN BLACKOUT AND ELECTRICITY POLICY: ALTERNATIVES TO TRANSMISSION CONSTRUCTION

It is time to stop regulating the electricity industry as if it were a natural monopoly. Technology has moved on and competition must not be discouraged by regulation. Competition is not only necessary for lower prices to consumers: the particular technological developments that have taken place in recent years mean that competition can diversify supply sources and contribute to increased security of supply.     

Endogenous institutions in bureaucratic compliance games

We consider a set-up where two governments have either conflicting or matching preferences on the provision of differentiated (local) goods supplied by a common monopoly bureau. We develop a two-stage game. At stage-1, the two governments decide whether or not to merge into a single institution. At stage-2, all players simultaneously and independently take their decisions in terms of production and rents, with perfect knowledge of the other players' strategies. We solve the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium of this game, and show that, if the bureau immediately updates its objective function to institutional changes, then the governments always prefer merging. However, if there is an initial bureaucratic inertia in adjusting the bureau's objective function to the institutional change, then ruling politicians may prefer decentralisation to centralisation, depending on the strategic properties of the compliance game and on their own discounting. Received: May 1999 / Accepted April 2000     

Whose wages do unions raise? A dynamic model of unionism and wage rate determination for young men

We estimate the union premium for young men over a period of declining unionization (1980–87) through a procedure which identifies the alternative sources of the endogeneity of union status. While we estimate the average increase in wages resulting from union employment to be in excess of 20% we find that the return to unobserved heterogeneity operating through union status is substantial and that the union premium is highly variable. We also find that the premium is sensitive to the form of sorting allowed in estimation. Moreover, the data are consistent with comparative advantage sorting. Our results suggest that the unobserved heterogeneity which positively contributes to the likelihood of union membership is associated with higher wages. We are unable, however, to determine whether this is due to the ability of these workers to extract monopoly rents or whether it reflects the more demanding hiring standards of employers faced by union wages. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

制定成本会计准则的必要性——基于价格管制和政府采购的视角

文章运用垄断价格管制理论和福利经济学相关理论分析了当前出现垄断行业的"三高"以及政府采购成本偏高的现象,指出成本会计准则的制定是对垄断行业进行价格管制的前提,同时成本会计准则的制定必将有利于对政府采购成本实行有效控制,最后就如何制定成本会计准则提出了一些建议。     

新媒体背景下卷烟市场监管模式研究

本文从探索新媒体形势下专卖市场监管出发,结合行业当前形势,分析了目前专卖市场监管存在的问题和原因,提出了新媒体形势下市场监管的措施和办法,从而为实现"卷烟上水平"提供强有力的保障。     

Process innovation and the persistence of monopoly with labour-managed firms

The issue of the persistence of monopoly when at least one labour-managed firm takes part in an auction for a cost-reducing innovation is tackled in this paper. It is shown that (i) when the incumbent is a profit-maximizing firm while the entrant is a labour-managed firm, monopoly persists; (ii) when both firms are labour-managed, monopoly persists only if the technology initially employed by the incumbent is highly inefficient as compared to the new one; and, finally, (iii) when the incumbent is labour-managed while the outsider is a profit seeking agent, then entry always occurs and monopoly changes hands. Received: 3 July 1997 / Accepted: 16 February 1998