Strategic corporate social responsibility of high-speed rail in China

This paper investigates the strategic corporate social responsibility (CSR) of a high-speed rail (HSR) firm when competing with an airline firm in a differentiated transportation market and the interactions with government environmental policies in the context of a Cournot–Bertrand comparison. We find that a standard CSR chosen by the government is lower under Cournot than that under Bertrand when both the marginal cost of HSR and product substitutability are low enough, while a voluntary CSR chosen by the HSR operator is always higher under Cournot than that under Bertrand. We also find that the voluntary CSR could be higher or lower than the standard CSR, depending on marginal costs, product substitutability, and competition modes. We then show that when the government imposes an environmental tax together with CSR activities, both the strategic CSR and environmental tax are always lower under Cournot than those under Bertrand. Finally, we show that equilibrium traffic volumes, ticket fares, consumer welfare, and social welfare are independent of competition modes with environmental tax.     

Cournot–Bertrand comparisons under R&D competition: Output versus R&D subsidies

We compare Cournot and Bertrand competitions with R&D investment under output versus R&D subsidy policies. We demonstrate that Cournot firms invest more (less) in R&D and the government grants more (less) subsidies than for Bertrand firms with output (R&D) subsidies. We also find that both competition modes yield the same welfare with output subsidy, while Bertrand yields higher welfare than Cournot with R&D subsidy. Finally, firms' profits and welfare in Cournot are higher under output subsidies, while they can be higher in Bertrand under R&D subsidies if the product substitutability is high and the firm's R&D investment is efficient.     

Augustin cournot and neoclassical economics

This paper compares Cournot's exposition of elasticity of demand and the theory of the firm with modern exposition. In the case of the theory of the firm, this comparison is accomplished by translating the modern textbook exposition into Cournot's mathematics. It is demonstrated that Cournot's exposition translates into current usage in all cases but that the degree of convolution in the translation process varies from case to case. For elasticity, only trivial algebraic manipulation is involved. For monopoly, the inverse derivative rule translates Cournot's exposition into current usage. The case of perfect competition is much more complicated. Although Cournot gets the same result as current theory, his mathematics doesn't translate directly into current usage. But a comparison in the text that doesn't appear in his mathematics suggests that he considered the modern derivation but chose to use another derivation. One reason for doing this is rather obvious. It fits better into Cournot's unified approach to the theory of the firm. It might also be judged more elegant and mathematically precise. With regard to oligopoly, Cournot provided, in a different contest, the analytical structure that is now used in IO to analyze differentiated oligopoly. It is retierated that Cournot had a general method for finding equilibria for non-cooperative games and was aware of the fact that his method was more general than a single application. The relation between Cournot equilibria and Nash equilibria is discussed. The author benefited from comments by Richard R. Ruble and a referee, but is responsible for all errors.     

On the stabilizing virtues of imperfect competition

We analyze the stabilizing role of imperfect competition on fluctuations as a result of indeterminacy and endogenous cycles. In this paper, imperfect competition is a source of monopoly profits, because of producer market power. Considering an overlapping generations model with capital accumulation and elastic labor supply, we show that under imperfect competition, the emergence of endogenous fluctuations requires a weaker substitution between production factors than under perfect competition. In this sense, imperfect competition stabilizes fluctuations. However, we find an opposite conclusion concerning the elasticity of labor supply. Indeed, endogenous fluctuations are compatible with a less elastic labor supply under imperfect competition.     

Effect of a tariff on the environment and welfare: The case of an environmental differentiated duopoly in a Green Market

Employing a model of environmental quality-differentiated products, we analyze the effect of an ad valorem tariff on the unit emission level of the products, the environment and welfare in the Bertrand and the Cournot duopoly cases, respectively. We show that the effect of the tariff policy depends on the mode of market competition and the degree of marginal social valuation of environmental damage.     

Overshooting,reform and retreat of the welfare state

Summary The paper discusses various reforms that may lower the costs of the contemporary welfare state, including a shift from taxes to actuarially fair, although still compulsory, insurance premia; wider use of co-insurance,etc. It is also suggested that social security entitlements are made more robust against political interventions by moving them outside of the government budget. Freer competition is suggested in the provision of social services. Reform of the political process is also discussed to avoid an overshooting of the welfare state in the sense that imperfections in the political process result in excessive welfare state spending.Seventh Tinbergen Lecture delivered on October 1, 1993 at De Nederlandsche Bank, Amsterdam for the Royal Netherlands Economic Association. I Am grateful for comments on an early draft of this paper by Thorvaldur Gylfason, Torsten Persson, Agnar Sandmo, Karl Gustaf Scherman, Lars E.O. Svensson, Paul Söderlind and Lars Söderström.     

Mergers, welfare, and concentration: Results from a model of stackelberg-cournot oligopoly

This paper explores the relationship between mergers, welfare, and concentration, using a two-stage oligopoly model that generalizes the Cournot and Stackelberg models. This model has been used to show that some profitable mergers raise welfare and that some welfare-lowering mergers are unprofitable. Based on this, one might conclude that policy designed to restrict mergers is unnecessary or even counterproductive. This present paper examines in greater detail the implications of this model and finds that a merger's effects depend not only on the reduction in the number of firms, but also on premerger and postmerger firm behavior. In fact, most mergers lower welfare, and many of these are profitable. Usually, but not always, changes in concentration and welfare are negatively related.     

Taxation,Fines, and Producer Liability Rules: Efficiency and Market Structure Implications

This paper analyzes the comparative efficiency of producer liability rules and regulatory policy in short-run and long-run competitive equilibria with endogenous product safety. Pigouvian taxes on output and safety provision fail to achieve the long-run social optimum. An appropriately designed policy involving fines on accidents and subsidies on safety provision achieves efficiency; however, the optimal policy may involve the taxation, not the subsidization, of product safety. Tort liability also leads to efficient outcomes but may be associated with perverse structural changes. For example, increased liability exposure may induce de novo entry in hazardous sectors, even with fully capitalized firms.     

Regulating the Anticommons: Insights from Public‐Expenditure Theory

This article offers a new interpretation of the traditional Cournot complements problem, or anticommons, by using the theory of public goods to gain a perspective on the problem. Specifically, I examine the pricing strategies and regulation of multiple monopolies that produce products which consumers view as perfect complements. I show that collusion by the firms increases total social welfare and that the collusion problem can be reinterpreted as a problem of provision of public goods from the point of view of the firms. I take this insight further and derive the familiar concepts of the Samuelson marginal condition and the ratio equilibrium for the firms. I compare these outcomes to the first best solution and then apply incentive‐compatible mechanisms to strategically implement the Pareto superior ratio‐equilibrium outcome and the optimal marginal‐cost pricing outcome. Finally, I show how this methodology can be applied to the more familiar Cournot model of oligopoly.     

Does a tariff really enhance welfare?

Tanaka (1993) argues the small reciprocal tariff reduces the average costs of firms and enhances the world welfare under a free entry Cournot oligopoly with increasing returns to scale. This paper shows the welfare improving effect which was found in Tanaka (1993) results from the relaxation of the excess entry. We also find, however, such a world welfare enhancing tariff is not valid because of the instability of the Cournot solution. It indicates that we must take great care about the stability in using the Cournot oligopoly model with increasing returns to scale.     

Endogenous Markups,Intensity of Competition,and Persistence of Business Cycles

In order to study the propagation mechanism of business cycles, in particular to investigate how the intensity of competition affects market structure and output persistence over business cycles, this paper presents a real business-cycle model with imperfect competition and increasing returns to scale. This analysis considers the markups of price over cost to be endogenous. With endogenous markups, two standard forms of oligopolistic competition—Bertrand and Cournot—are considered. Results show that: (1) the propagation mechanism in the sense of output persistence is greater under Cournot; (2) the propagation mechanism is unequivocally greater with imperfect competition, regardless of whether markups are endogenous or not; and (3) under imperfect competition, the propagation mechanism is greater with endogenous markups than with exogenous markups. Overall, these results suggest that more intense competition produces lower persistence in output growth and, thus, a weaker propagation mechanism. In a calibration exercise, these differences were also found to be quantitatively important.     

Will Social Welfare Expenditures Survive Tax Competition?

Increasing economic openness creates demands for social welfareprogrammes designed to cushion the impact of economic changes,but may also encourage governments to reduce tax rates to attractmobile economic resources. Competitive tax reductions couldthen prevent governments from being able to finance significantwelfare spending. Alternatively, economic globalization mightimprove the ability of governments to afford social welfareprogrammes—and several considerations point in this direction.First, taxes on internationally mobile activity represent onlysmall fractions of total revenue collections; personal incometaxes, value-added taxes, and social insurance contributionsfinance most social welfare spending. Second, internationalcompetition need not reduce taxes, and indeed, over the past25 years, corporate tax collections have remained high as fractionsof GDP and total taxes. Third, the vitality of a country's economylargely determines its level of social spending. To the extentthat incomes rise as a result, greater economic openness shouldstrengthen provision of social welfare. Footnotes ¹ E-mail address: jrhines{at}umich.edu     

垄断企业的拆分可以改善社会福利吗?——基于一个熊彼特增长框架的分析

关于现实经济中大的垄断企业是否需要拆分一直是一个争议较大的问题。一种观点认为,拆分可以消除垄断,加强竞争,从而促进创新,这将最终有利于提高社会福利。另一种观点认为,拆分使得垄断利润减少,消除规模效应,这可能不利于创新,因而拆分对社会福利的影响是坏的。基于Aghion和Howitt(1992)的熊彼特增长模型,本文考察了拆分对创新、经济增长和社会福利的影响。拆分对研发投资规模和经济增长具有阻碍作用,企业拆分越多,研发投资规模越小,经济增长率越低;拆分对社会福利的影响是不确定的,从社会福利水平极大化的角度出发,垄断企业是否需要拆分取决于竞争性均衡经济中研发投资规模与社会最优经济中研发投资规模的对比。本文旨在运用内生经济增长框架,从社会福利水平极大化的角度出发,为垄断企业的拆分提供一些理论依据。     

The welfare effects of a european anti-dumping duty and price-undertaking policy

In the framework of its anti-dumping policy, the European Union can use two instruments: an anti-dumping duty and a price-undertaking. The objective of both instruments is to eliminate the price difference, on the European market, between a European product and a similar foreign product which is dumped on the European market. The authors first briefly look at the institutional framework within which the European Union operates, and at the actual use made of the two instruments since 1980. The main purpose of the paper is to show that, from a welfare point of view, an anti-dumping duty is always better than a price-undertaking. This result is very robust: it holds for quasi-linear preferences, under both Bertrand and Cournot competition, and irrespective of the timing of the firms' decisions.     

重构我国公路产品生产环节的市场结构

文章首先描述了我国公路产品生产环节市场的现状，并指出其具有行政垄断性市场结构的特征；进而运用福利经济学对公路产品生产环节的行政垄断性市场结构进行了深入的经济效率分析，并指出其中存在的巨大福利损失；最后运用有效竞争理论提出了重构我国公路产品生产环节市场结构的若干构想。     

Export and Strategic Currency Hedging

This paper examines an international Cournot duopoly wherein a home firm and a foreign firm compete in the home market under exchange rate uncertainty. The foreign exporting firm, being risk averse, has incentives to hedge its exchange rate risk exposure. In a two-stage setting, we show that hedging via an unbiased currency futures market acts as a strategic device. In particular, under either constant or decreasing absolute risk aversion, an increase in the hedging volume of the foreign firm promotes its exports and deters the home firm’s output. In contrast to the well-known full-hedging result in a perfectly competitive environment, we find that the foreign firm over-hedges for strategic reasons. Furthermore, the separation result from the hedging literature under perfect competition no longer holds in our duopoly framework, i.e., equilibrium output levels depend on the risk attitude of the foreign firm as well as the probability distribution of the spot exchange rate.     

Pollution,Factor Ownerships,and Emission Taxes

This paper employs Cournot’s (1838) model of complementary goods to analyze the optimal emission taxation under joint and independent ownership with pollution. When the marginal damage is small (large), an emission taxation is unnecessary (necessary), because the quantity (environmental) distortion is more serious than the environmental (quantity) distortion. This finding has never been presented in the literature. In contrast to Cournot (1838), a striking result is that independent ownership may be welfare superior to joint ownership when the marginal damage of externality is large in the absence of governmental intervention.     

基于双寡头垄断模型的垄断国有企业改革分析

国有企业垄断是一个经济学问题,与所有制性质没有必然关系,需要从理性的经济学视角来审视。基于中国国情,从由国有企业构成的双寡头垄断市场出发,分析并比较由国有企业、私有企业及混合所有制企业组合而成的各种双寡头垄断市场的价格、产量及社会福利。可以发现,私有化对社会福利的提升作用是有条件的,完全的私有化未必能提升社会福利;在当前的社会经济条件下,混合所有制是解决国有企业垄断问题可行、务实的途径,其股权结构十分重要。     

Second-Best Pollution Taxes and the Structure of Preferences

We characterize optimal taxes on polluting and nonpolluting goods in Ramsey and Mirrlees second-best environments. The polluting good tax differs from the Pigouvian tax by Ramsey terms in the first and by Stiglitz/Mirrlees plus another adjustment term in the second. These terms can be positive, negative, or zero. If preferences are weakly separable in public and private goods, with the private good subutility weakly separable in labor and produced goods, nonpolluting goods are taxed uniformly and the concept of a tax differential between polluting and nonpolluting goods is well defined. The differential is then less than the Pigouvian tax in the Ramsey framework, but it can be greater, equal to, or smaller than the Pigouvian tax in the Mirrlees second best. In Mirrlees second best, if preferences are separable in labor supply and other goods, the second-best tax differential is identical to the Pigouvian tax.     

瑞典福利政策和老年社会保障制度的发展及其启示

瑞典的福利政策和老年社会保障制度，在历史上促进了经济发展和人民生活水平的提高。但在石油危机发生后，经济增长速度减慢，养老保障开支增多。最终，瑞典通过改革和完善社会福利政策及老年社会保障制度，走出困境，并积累了大量改革经验。这对于我国推行惠民政策，建立和完善社会保障体系具有诸多启示。