需求不确定性下供应商回收未售商品对季节性商品采购的影响

分析需求不确定性条件下,供应商回收零售商未售商品策略对零售商季节性商品采购量的影响,通过数学模型分别对不同需求状态和不同回收价情况下零售商最优采购量进行仿真,说明随着需求不确定性程度的增加,零售商商品的采购数量增加而期望利润下降;供应商通过优化批发价和回收价组合可以增加零售商在相同需求状态时的采购量,提高供应商的期望利润。     

Preference for output price uncertainty by the non-renewable resource extracting firm

We establish a general preference for price uncertainty by the price-taking, risk-neutral, non-renewable resource extracting firm with orthodox convex extraction costs. We prove that the relevant value function for profits over an interval is convex in output price.     

Competition and regulation with product differentiation

We consider a market for differentiated products, where one good is supplied by a regulated monopolist and competitive firms operate in an unregulated segment. In this setting we investigate the issue of whether to allow the monopolist to diversify into the unregulated segment by owning a competitive firm. Under asymmetric cost information, if goods are substitutes a diversified monopolist, which exaggerates its costs in the regulated segment to charge a higher regulated price, stimulates the demand for the competitive affiliate. This strengthens the firm??s incentive to inflate costs, since doing so generates a positive informational spillover to its profits in the competitive segment. Consequently, a regime of separation, which prevents the firm from operating in the competitive segment, is welfare-enhancing. Conversely, with complements, cost exaggeration in the regulated monopoly reduces the demand and harms profits in the competitive segment, and allowing the monopolist to diversify into the competitive segment therefore generates countervailing incentives, which weaken the firm??s interest in cost manipulation and improve social welfare.     

PRODUCT QUALITY UNDER TWO-PRONGED UNCERTAINTY*

This paper builds on a model by Mikami (1991) to explore the effects of uncertainty on the producer's choice of product quality when (1) quality influences demand price and (2) producers are not risk takers. It is shown that even risk-neutral producers might make different quality choices under uncertainty and that those choices will depend upon the explicit way in which uncertainty influences the demand price.     

RISKY PRODUCTION WITH EX-ANTE PRICES UNDER MONOPOLY ANALYTICAL AND SIMULATION RESULTS

This paper concerns the case of a monopolist facing multiplicative uncertainty in demand. Karlin and Carr (1962), henceforth KC, show that, when price and production are both chosen ex ante , the uncertainty price exceeds the certainty price. They also give a sufficient condition under which the firm locates above the certainty demand curve, but they do not consider the effect on the output level. In this note we replicate the KC results and then go further. In the special case that the price elasticity of certainty demand is constant, and the probability distribution for the uncertainty parameter in the demand function is uniform, output is unambiguously lower under uncertainty, and KC's condition for the firm to locate above the certainty demand curve can be strengthened to one that is both necessary and sufficient. The robustness of these results is tested under less stringent assumptions on demand, abandoning symmetry for a lognormal distribution of the uncertainty parameter. Simulation confirms that the results hold up, and also determines the effects upon the firm's decisions of an increase in demand uncertainty.     

Monopoly Price Dispersion Under Demand Uncertainty

When a monopolist sets its price before its demand is known, then it may set more than one price and limit the availability of its output at lower prices. This article adds demand uncertainty and price rigidities to the standard model of monopoly pricing. When there are two states of demand and the ex post monopoly price is greater when demand is high then the monopolist's optimal ex ante pricing strategy is to set two prices and limit purchases at the lower price.     

RETAIL PRICE REGULATION AND THE OPTION TO DELAY

ABSTRACT ** :  This paper examines a two-period model of an investment decision in a network industry characterized by demand uncertainty, economies of scale and sunk costs. In the absence of regulation we identify the market conditions under which a monopolist decides to invest early as well as the underlying overall welfare output. In a regulated environment, we consider a monopolist who faces no downstream (final good) competition but is subject to retail price regulation. We identify the welfare-maximizing regulated prices when the unregulated market outcome is set as the benchmark. We show that if the regulator can commit to ex post regulation – that is, regulated prices that are contingent to future demand realization – then regulated prices that allow the firm to recover its total costs of production are welfare-maximizing. Thus, under ex post price regulation there is no need to compensate the regulated firm for the option to delay that it foregoes when investing today. We argue, however, that regulators cannot make this type of commitment and, therefore, price regulation is often ex ante – that is, regulated prices are not contingent to future demand. We show that the optimal ex ante regulation, and the extent to which regulated prices need to incorporate an option to delay, depend on the nature of demand uncertainty.     

Advance-purchase discounts as a price discrimination device

In an intertemporal setting in which individual uncertainty is resolved over time, advance-purchase discounts can serve to price discriminate between consumers with different expected valuations for the product. Consumers with a high expected valuation purchase the product before learning their actual valuation at the offered advance-purchase discount; consumers with a low expected valuation will wait and purchase the good at the regular price only in the event where their realized valuation is high. We characterize the profit-maximizing pricing strategy of the monopolist. Furthermore, adopting a mechanism design perspective, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which advance-purchase discounts implement the monopolist's optimal mechanism.     

Endogenous fixprices and sticky price adjustment of risk-averse firms

A risk-averse price-setting firm which knows the quantity demanded at the status quo price but has imperfect information otherwise may choose not to change it although an otherwise identical risk-neutral firm would do so, provided the variance of the firm's subjective probability distribution over quantities demanded as a function of price displays a kink at the status quo. This is equivalent to risk aversion of order one. When no such endogenous fixprice exists, the size of price adjustment still tends to zero as risk aversion tends to infinity, and to any arbitrarily small menu cost there exists a degree of risk aversion so that the firm will not adjust.     

The economics of posted prices in a concentrated market where demand is uncertain

This paper analyses the theory of the optimal output decision for a firm whose policy is to post a non-negotiable price for a good or service in a concentrated market where the demand facing the firm is determined, in part, by a random variable. The theoretical findings are the opposite of those in competitive markets; Proposition 1 states that the optimal output of a risk-averse firm is expected to be larger than that of a risk-neutral firm if the expected payoff of its marginal profit is less than or equal to 1. Proposition 2 states that the optimal output of a risk-seeking firm is expected to be smaller than that of a risk-neutral firm if the expected payoff of its marginal profit is greater than 1.     

Natural monopoly and differential pricing

Under uniform pricing a monopolist cannot make a positive profit in equilibrium. I analyze how differential pricing can be exploited by a natural monopolist to deter entry when entry is costless. In a two-stage game with price competition before quantity competition I show that the incumbent firm can deter entry and make a positive profit in equilibrium. The incumbent sets two different prices, the low price to deter entry and the high price to generate profit. Entry is not possible because of scale effects. If dumping is allowed for all firms no positive profits are realizable, but welfare is reduced. I show that for some parameter values the incumbent is forced to engage in a stunt (i.e., set a negative low price) to keep entrants out.     

Competition and confidentiality: Signaling quality in a duopoly when there is universal private information

We model non-cooperative signaling by two firms that compete over a continuum of consumers, assuming each consumer has private information about the intensity of her preferences for the firms' respective products and each firm has private information about its own product's quality. We characterize a symmetric separating equilibrium in which each firm's price reveals its respective product quality. We show that the equilibrium prices, the difference between those prices, the associated outputs, and profits are all increasing functions of the ex ante probability of high safety. If horizontal product differentiation is sufficiently great then equilibrium prices and profits are higher under incomplete information about quality than if quality were commonly known. Thus, while signaling imposes a distortionary loss on a monopolist using price to signal quality, duopolists may benefit from the distortion as it can reduce competition. Finally, average quality is lower since signaling quality redistributes demand towards low-quality firms.     

Imported inputs and privatization in downstream mixed oligopoly with foreign ownership

This paper examines welfare implications of privatization in a mixed oligopoly with vertically related markets, where an upstream foreign monopolist sells an essential input to public and private firms located downstream in the domestic country. The impact on domestic welfare of privatizing the downstream public firm is shown to contain three effects. The first is an output distortion effect, which negatively affects welfare since privatization decreases the production of final good for consumption. The second is an input price lowering effect resulting from a decrease in derived demand for the input. When the level of privatization increases, a decrease in final good production lowers input demand, causing input price to decline and domestic welfare to increase. The third is a rent‐leaking effect associated with foreign ownership in the downstream private firm. The rival domestic firm strategically increases its final good production, causing profits accrued to foreign investors to increase and domestic welfare to decline. Without foreign ownership in the downstream private firm, the optimal policy toward the public firm is complete privatization as the output distortion effect is dominated by the input price lowering effect. With foreign ownership, however, complete privatization can never be socially optimal due to the additional negative impact on domestic welfare of the rent‐leaking effect. We further discuss implications for domestic welfare under different privatization schemes (e.g., selling the privatization shares to the upstream foreign monopolist or to the rival domestic firm).     

Cyclical dumping and correlated business cycles in imperfect markets: empirical applications to the Canadian pulp and paper industry

This paper deals with theoretical and empirical aspects of firm behaviour under imperfect competition and uncertainty. It contains an analysis of the behaviour of a firm facing a stochastic demand curve for its output in the ordinary (home market), but in addition with access to a backstop (international) market. The theory is thus a variation of the theory of dumping. Since the expected volume in general differs from the volume at the expected price, a price-setting mode is not equal to a quantity mode. Cyclical dumping, in the sense of a negative correlation between domestic and foreign sales, would occur if the firm adhered to a pricing mode in the ordinary market, and was able to learn about the demand conditions in the ordinary market before it decided how much to sell in the international market. The expirical part of the paper is an illustration of how to test for different behavioural modes and cyclical dumping by applying the model to the CAnadian pulp and paper industry. In the empirical exercise the domestic markets are the North American market for pulp and newsprint, while the backstop market are the corresponding European markets. One of the main results of this exercise is that the Canadian industry seems to operate under pricing behaviour for both pulp and newsprint, while cyclical dumping on the European market applies only for pulp.     

Front-running dynamics

We integrate a monopolist dual trader into a dynamic model of speculation. In static settings, [J.-C. Rochet, J.-L. Vila, Insider trading without normality, Rev. Econ. Stud. 61 (1994), 131-152] establish an irrelevance result—expected equilibrium outcomes are the same whether the monopolist speculator sees liquidity trade or not; and Roell [Dual-capacity trading and market quality, J. Finan. Intermediation (1990), 105-124] shows that with multiple speculators, dual trading benefits liquidity traders. In dynamic settings, these results are reversed: a front-running speculator exploits knowledge of future liquidity trade, extracting greater profits by smoothing profit extraction intertemporally. Front running introduces positive serial correlation to order flow. Accordingly, market makers discount past order flow in prices, but prices retain the martingale property.     

Capacity expansion and dynamic monopoly pricing

We substitute to the plant size problem, as investigated by Chenery [Chenery, H., 1952. Overcapacity and the acceleration principle. Econometrica], a new version in which a profit-maximizing monopolist may combine its investment policy with a price policy adjusting demand upwards or downwards over time. We characterize the optimal price and investment policies. The optimal price policy determines an investment pattern either with constant increments of capacity over time, or becoming constant after a finite time. The existing capacity is either fully used at each instant between two investment dates; or the monopolist first quotes the instantaneous monopoly price and, thereafter, the price dampening instantaneous demand at the optimal installed capacity level.     

Monopolists and viscous demand

We characterize the optimal dynamic price policy of a monopolist who faces “viscous” demand for its services. Demand is viscous if it adjusts relatively slowly to price changes. We show that with the optimal policy the monopolist stops short of achieving 100% market penetration, even when all of the consumers have the same long-run willingness to pay for the service. Furthermore, for certain parameter values in the model, the price policy requires rapid oscillations of the price path.     

THE DETERMINANTS OF THE QUANTITY‐QUALITY BALANCE IN MONOPOLY*

This paper describes how a monopolist manipulates the balance of quantity and quality in order to increase revenue when its customers treat quantity and quality as substitutes. This ‘skewing’ of quality depends on the characteristics of customer's demand for quality. Customers differ in demand for quality, because they differ in either (i) their preferences and/or (ii) their time cost per unit. The monopolist is constrained to supply the same quality of good to all customers. The price and quality per unit are described under the assumption the monopolist (i) profit maximises; (ii) maximises social welfare subject to a profit constraint. The determinants of the skewing of quantity and quality are found under third‐degree price discrimination and uniform pricing.     

Dynamic control of a monopolist’s product and process innovation with reference quality

ABSTRACT

Our main purpose is to investigate the dynamic control problem of a monopolist’s product and process innovation under reference quality. The main features of this article are: (i) a monopolist dealing with customer behaviour in the spirit of the principle of behaviour economics determines the product price, and carries out the activities of product and process innovation; (ii) the consumers’ demand depends on price, product quality and reference quality, and adopts an additive separable demand function form. Our main results show that under the cases of the monopolist optimum and the social planner optimum, (i) there exists an unique stable, which is a saddle-point steady-state equilibrium; (ii) the change rates of the monopolist’s investments in product and process innovation are increasing with the reference quality, while the monopolist’s steady-state investments in product and process innovation are decreasing with the reference quality; (iii) as the memory parameter increases with other parameters kept constant, it is very likely that the monopolist’s investment in process innovation be greater than the investment in product innovation; and (iv) the social incentive towards both investments in product and process innovation is always larger than the private incentive characterizing the profit-seeking monopolist.     

Market Power and Buffer Stocks

The first-order conditions for a monopolist inventory holder are found under more general conditions than previously. It is found that monopolist storers facing inelastic demand will carry over more stock than they would with competition unless the elasticity of demand b increasing as price decreases or is constant. The competitive stocks equilibrium is identified and found to be Pareto optimal and hence Sams' result that there will be no losers from a rent-maximizing buffer stock policy is shown to be wrong.