Concentration of competing retail stores

The geographical concentration of stores that sell similar commodities is analyzed using a two-dimensional spatial competition model. A higher concentration of stores attracts more consumers with taste uncertainty and low price expectations (a market-size effect), while it leads to fiercer price competition (a price-cutting effect). Our model is general enough to allow for the coexistence of multiple (possibly) asymmetric clusters of stores. We provide sufficient conditions for the nonemptiness of equilibrium store location choices in pure strategies. Through numerical examples, we illustrate the trade-off between the market-size and price-cutting effects, and provide agglomeration patterns of stores in special cases.     

Spatial discrimination: Bertrand vs. Cournot with asymmetric demands

This paper develops a barbell model a la Hwang and Mai [Hwang, H., and C.C. Mai, 1990, Effects of spatial price discrimination on output, welfare, and location, American Economic Review 80, 567–575.] with homogeneous product and asymmetric demands to compare prices, aggregate profits and social welfare between Cournot and Bertrand competition, and to analyze the firms' equilibrium locations. It focuses on the impacts of the spatial barrier generated from transport costs, and the market size effect resulting from asymmetric demands. It shows that the market-size effect is crucial in determining firms' locations under Cournot competition, but insignificant under Bertrand competition. Moreover, the equilibrium price of the large market and the aggregate profits are lower but the social welfare is higher under Cournot competition than under Bertrand competition if one of the markets is sufficiently large and the transport cost is high.     

“店选网购”的竞争效应及其反垄断政策涵义

随着互联网和电子商务的发展，消费者在店商试选后以较低价格从网商购买商品的“店选网购”现象非常普遍，厂商或店商经常以其存在搭便车问题为由采取维持转售价格予以限制。本文通过构建具有横向差异化的霍特林模型，考察“店选网购”的竞争效应。研究表明，尽管“店选网购”存在搭便车问题，却能促进店商与网商间的竞争，降低店商和网商的价格和利润，使消费者从中获益，但对社会福利的影响结果是不明确的；其反垄断政策涵义是，“店选网购”具有促进竞争和存在搭便车问题的双重特性，不能简单地作为豁免维持转售价格的正当理由，而应根据实际情况具体分析。     

Multiproduct price competition with heterogeneous consumers and nonconvex costs

This paper extends the oligopolistic model of price competition to environments with multiple goods, heterogeneous consumers, and arbitrary continuous cost functions. A Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies with an endogenous sharing rule is proven to exist. It is also shown that, in environments with fixed costs and constant marginal costs, all (symmetric and asymmetric) equilibria exhibit price dispersion across stores. Furthermore, the paper identifies scenarios in which prices will necessarily be random. In these markets, stores keep each other guessing because, given the fixed costs, they would incur a loss if their price strategies were anticipated and beaten by competitors. This is interpreted as an important economic feature that is possibly behind random price promotions such as weekly specials.     

Price-matching policies: An empirical case

Promises by retailers to match the prices of their competitors give an impression of fierce price competition. These policies, however, may deter rivals from cutting prices because the threat of price matching makes it more likely that market share will not be gained. This paper empirically tests these two conflicting theories using data collected from grocery stores in a market where several stores had announced that they would match the prices of the low-price supermarket. The evidence supports the theory that price-matching policies help supermarkets avoid price competition and therefore lead to generally higher prices.     

The Evolving Food Chain: Competitive Effects of Wal-Mart's Entry into the Supermarket Industry

We analyze the effect of Wal-Mart's entry into the grocery market using a unique store-level price panel data set. We use ordinary least squares and two instrumental-variables specifications to estimate the effect of Wal-Mart's entry on competitors' prices of 24 grocery items across several categories. Wal-Mart's price advantage over competitors for these products averages approximately 10%. On average, competitors' response to entry by a Wal-Mart Supercenter is a price reduction of 1–1.2%, mostly due to smaller-scale competitors; the response of the "Big Three" supermarket chains (Albertson's, Safeway, and Kroger) is less than half that size. Low-end grocery stores, which compete more directly with Wal-Mart, cut their prices more than twice as much as higher-end stores. We confirm our results using a falsification exercise, in which we test for Wal-Mart's effect on prices of services that it does not provide, such as movie tickets and dry-cleaning services.     

Two-Sided Platforms: Product Variety and Pricing Structures

This paper provides a new modeling framework to analyze two-sided platforms connecting producers and consumers. In contrast to the existing literature, indirect network effects are determined endogenously, through consumers' taste for variety and producer competition. Three new aspects of platform pricing structures are derived.   First, the optimal platform pricing structure shifts towards extracting more rents from producers relative to consumers when consumers have stronger demand for variety, since producers become less substitutable. With platform competition, consumer preferences for variety, producer market power, and producer economies of scale in multihoming also make platforms' price-cutting strategies on the consumer side less effective. This second effect on equilibrium pricing structures goes in the opposite direction relative to the first one.   Third, variable fees charged to producers can serve to trade off producer innovation incentives against the need to reduce a platform holdup problem.     

客户价值及其在产品评价中的应用

对传统客户价值概念进行了扩展 ,建立了价格驱动的客户价值趋近函数模型 ,为优化产品配置、提高价格的竞争力提供了参考。在客户价值趋近模型的基础上 ,提出了基于客户价值的产品评价方法 ,并结合汽车行业进行了具体应用 ,证明了方法的有效性和实用性。     

Price and Nonprice Competition with Endogenous Market Structure

This paper examines the effect of the intensity of short-run price competition and other exogenous variables that affect gross profit margins—such as the degree of product differentiation and the consumers' responsiveness to quality—on market structure and on advertising and R&D expenditure. A key result is that more intense short-run competition can lead to lower concentration in industries with high advertising or R&D intensity, unlike exogenous-sunk-cost industries. Also, price competition has a negative effect on advertising or R&D expenditure. A case study is also presented, which is consistent with the theoretical results of the paper.     

地方政府竞争、土地价格与外商直接投资——基于69个地级市面板数据的分析

选取2005—2015年我国中部五省共69个地级市的数据，在考虑存在空间溢出效应可能性的基础上，采用空间面板数据模型分析地方政府竞争、土地价格对外商直接投资的空间影响。实证研究结果表明：工业用地价格降低和商业用地价格升高有利于吸引外商直接投资，地方政府竞争通过直接和间接作用于土地出让价格两种手段影响外商直接投资规模。土地价格和政府竞争对地理相邻地区的FDI能够产生显著影响，一个地区的工业土地价格降低、商业土地价格升高将抑制地理相邻地区的FDI规模，同时，一个地区政府竞争的加剧也会降低地理相邻地区的FDI，但这一空间溢出效应在经济距离相邻权重下并不显著，说明中部五省地级市的竞争主要存在于地理位置相邻的地方政府间。     

Empirical Analysis of Competition between Wal-Mart and Other Retail Channels

This paper quantifies the degree of competition between Wal-Mart and different retail channels by exploiting a unique dataset that describes a consumer's choice of store. Using a discrete choice model, I estimate a consumer's choice of retailer in the sales market for DVDs among online, mass merchant, electronics, video specialty, and music stores. Wal-Mart competes more intensely with other mass merchants, and conditional on price and distance, the average consumer still prefers Wal-Mart to most other stores. I also consider a counterfactual experiment regarding the entry of Wal-Mart into 15 proposed store sites into California.     

On pricing and hedging options in regime-switching models with feedback effect

We study the pricing and hedging of European-style derivative securities in a Markov, regime-switching, model with a feedback effect depending on the economic condition. We adopt a pricing kernel which prices both financial and economic risks explicitly in a dynamically incomplete market and we provide an equilibrium analysis. A martingale representation for a European-style index option's price is established based on the price kernel. The martingale representation is then used to construct the local risk-minimizing strategy explicitly and to characterize the corresponding pricing measure.     

New Keynesian monopolistic competition and objective demand

The New Keynesian model of monopolistic competition by Blanchard [Blanchard, O., Kiyotaki, N., 1987. Monopolistic competition and the effects of aggregate demand. American Economic Review 77 (4), 647–666] is reformulated according to an objective demand approach making the behavior of all agents fully rational. The revised model is compared with the original model in terms of prices, quantities and welfare. Working with the revised model enhances the validity of the menu-cost argument and, different from the original model, implies that price rigidity is increasing in market concentration.     

两阶段供应链的价格牛鞭效应模型

在一个简单如两阶段的供应链中,如果需求者采用＂涨增跌减＂的行为模式,而供给者不采取适当的应对措施,则短期的需求变动可能造成未来较长时期的价格的持续上升和下跌,即价格的牛鞭效应。通过构建一模型,对这一现象作出合理解释,并基于该模型提出有效的价格牛鞭效应的控制措施。     

Product Rivalry with multiple Strategic weapons: an Analysis of price and advertising Competition

A dynamic model of product rivalry is developed for a market in which firms choose price and advertising intensity. The model, a state-space game, is implemented using data that consist of weekly price, sales, and promotional activity for four brands of saltine crackers sold by four chains of grocery stores in a small town. A number of questions can be asked of this data. First, is advertising predatory (merely changing market shares) or cooperative (shifting out market demand)? Second, are price and advertising own and cross-strategic complements or substitutes? And finally, do investments in stocks of goodwill and in price reductions make firms tough and aggressive or soft and accommodating?     

Panel data estimates of the production function and product and labor market imperfections

Consistent with two models of imperfect competition in the labor market—the efficient bargaining model and the monopsony model—we provide two extensions of a microeconomic version of Hall's framework for estimating price‐cost margins. We show that both product and labor market imperfections generate a wedge between factor elasticities in the production function and their corresponding shares in revenue, which can be characterized by a ‘joint market imperfections parameter’. Using an unbalanced panel of 10,646 French firms in 38 manufacturing industries over the period 1978–2001, we can classify these industries into six different regimes depending on the type of competition in the product and the labor market. By far the most predominant regime is one of imperfect competition in the product market and efficient bargaining in the labor market (IC‐EB), followed by a regime of imperfect competition in the product market and perfect competition or right‐to‐manage bargaining in the labor market (IC‐PR), and by a regime of perfect competition in the product market and monopsony in the labor market (PC‐MO). For each of these three predominant regimes, we assess within‐regime firm differences in the estimated average price‐cost mark‐up and rent sharing or labor supply elasticity parameters, following the Swamy methodology to determine the degree of true firm dispersion. To assess the plausibility of our findings in the case of the dominant regime (IC‐EB), we also relate our industry and firm‐level estimates of price‐cost mark‐up and extent of rent sharing to industry characteristics and firm‐specific variables respectively. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

零售店的竞争导向定价分析

影响顾客择店的主要因素是价格扣购物成本。零售店如何运用竞争导向定价?在主要考虑消费者到该零售店的距离和零售店的销售面积这两个因素的情况下,本文中我们通过运用豪泰林价格竞争模型和零售引力模型,分析在已知竞争对手价格和购物成本的情况下,该零售店的最佳价格,以及两零售店经过多次博弈后达到纳什均衡时各自的价格。     

Pricing used books on Amazon.com: a spatial approach to price dispersion

This paper estimates a spatial autoregressive (SAR) model of price dispersion using publicly available internet bookselling data. It uses a semiparametric adaptive estimator that does not require the usual Gaussian assumption of maximum likelihood (ML) estimators. The results suggest that both price competition and seller heterogeneity are key drivers of the observed price dispersion. The paper finds that sellers with large sales volume, newly established sellers and US mainland states-based sellers tend to price lower. The identified significant spatial interaction is evidence of spatial price competition. Controlling for everything else, a seller asks a lower price when large sellers charge relatively high prices, which is also evidence of price-based selling and undercutting.     

Voluntary Quality Disclosure under Price‐Signaling Competition

We analyze an oligopolistic competition with differentiated products and qualities. The quality of a product is not known to consumers. Each firm can make an imperfect disclosure of its product quality before engaging in price‐signaling competition. There are two regimes for separating equilibrium in our model depending on the parameters. Our analysis reveals that, in one of the separating regimes, price signaling leads to intense price competition between the firms under which not only the high‐quality firm but also the low‐quality firm chooses to disclose its product quality to soften the price competition. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Departures from marginal-cost pricing in the American automobile industry: Estimates for 1977–1978

How are prices set in the American automobile oligopoly? This paper seeks empirical estimates of the extent of departure from marginal-cost pricing and of the effects of foreign competition. The model estimated has product differentiation, multiproduct firms, and heterogeneity in consumer tastes. The estimation presumes that product type (proxied by engineering specifications) is exogenous to the price/quantity market equilibrium. Cross-section results for the 1977 and 1978 model years yield price-cost margins around 10%. Import competition has the effect of lowering equilibrium margins for compact and subcompact models.