A Stackelberg model of pricing of complementary goods under information asymmetry

We consider a duopoly market where two separate firms offer complementary goods in a leader–follower type move. Each firm has private forecast information about the uncertain market demand and decides whether to share it with the other firm. We show that information sharing would benefit the leader firm but hurt the follower firm as well as the total system if the follower firm shares information unconditionally. We then devise a “simple to implement” information sharing scheme under which both firms and the total system are better off. We also provide several interesting managerial insights and establish the robustness of the model in managing a supply chain through our analytical and simulation results.     

Delegation of Regulation*

We discuss a government’s incentives to delegate regulation to bureaucrats. The government faces a trade-off in its delegation decision: bureaucrats have knowledge of the firms in the industry that the government does not have, but at the same time, they have other preferences than the government. The preference bias and the private information interact to affect the incentives to delegate regulation. Allowing for constrained delegation, we introduce the concepts of weak and strict delegation. We find that bureaucratic discretion reduces with bureaucratic drift, while the effect of increased uncertainty about the firm’s technology depends on how that uncertainty changes.     

Incentives through consumer learning about tastes

We consider a long-lived firm that faces an infinite sequence of finitely-lived consumers. In each period, the firm can exert either high or low effort, which is the firm's private information. When consumers learn about the firm's talent from the outcomes of previous transactions, there exists no equilibrium in which the firm always exerts high effort. However, when consumers learn about their own tastes, such an equilibrium can exist. Consumer learning about tastes therefore is an alternative to reputational concerns that produces stable incentives. We discuss the implications of this mechanism for advertising, advertising content, and consumer education.     

Corruption in PPPs,incentives and contract incompleteness

We analyze risk allocation and contractual choices when public procurement is plagued with moral hazard, private information on exogenous shocks, and threat of corruption. Complete contracts entail state-contingent clauses that compensate the contractor for shocks unrelated to his own effort. By improving insurance, those contracts reduce the agency cost of moral hazard. When the contractor has private information on revenues shocks, verifying messages on shocks realizations is costly. Incomplete contracts do not specify state-contingent clauses, thereby saving on verifiability costs. This makes incomplete contracts attractive even though they entail greater agency costs. Because of private information on contracting costs, a public official may have discretion to choose whether to procure under a complete or an incomplete contract. When the public official is corrupt, such delegation results in incomplete contracts being chosen too often. Empirical predictions on the use of incomplete contracts and policy implications on the benefits of standardized contracts are discussed.     

Collusion Under Imperfect Monitoring with Asymmetric Firms

We explore the effects of asymmetries in capacity constraints on collusion where market demand is uncertain and where firms’ sales and prices are private information. We show that all firms can infer when at least one firm's sales are below some firm‐specific ‘trigger level.’ When firms use this public information to monitor the collusive agreement, price wars may occur on the equilibrium path. Symmetry facilitates collusion but, if price wars are sufficiently long, then the optimal collusive prices of symmetric capacity distributions are lower on average than the competitive prices of asymmetric capacity distributions. We draw conclusions for merger policy.     

Differences in managerial discretion across countries: how nation‐level institutions affect the degree to which ceos matter

The concept of managerial discretion provides a theoretical fulcrum for resolving the debate about whether chief executive officers (CEOs) have much influence over company outcomes. In this paper, we operationalize and further develop the construct of managerial discretion at the national level. In an empirical examination of 15 countries, we find that certain informal and formal national institutions—individualism, tolerance of uncertainty, cultural looseness, dispersed firm ownership, a common‐law legal origin, and employer flexibility—are associated with the degree of managerial discretion available to CEOs of public firms in a country. In turn, we show that country‐level managerial discretion is associated with how much impact CEOs have on the performance of their firms. We also find that discretion mediates the relationship between national institutions and CEO effects on firm performance. Finally, we discuss two inductively derived institutional themes: autonomy orientation and risk orientation. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Information Content of Method of Payment in Mergers: Evidence from Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs)

We provide evidence on the information content of the method of payment in mergers by examining shareholder returns in a sample of REIT mergers over the period 1994–1998. When the target firm is publicly held, we find that transactions are always stock-financed, and that acquiring firm shareholders sustain small negative returns around the announcement date. When the target is privately held, cash financing, mixed (stock and cash) financing, and placement of blocks of acquirer stock with target owners are more prevalent. Acquirer returns are positive in stock-financed mergers when the target is private, which is consistent with both the information signaling and monitoring by blockholders hypotheses. Further analysis supports the information signaling hypothesis as the dominant explanation. The effects of other explanatory variables are similar whether the target is public or private. Most significantly, acquiring shareholder returns are negatively related to the acquirer's size, but positively related to the acquirer's use of the UPREIT organizational structure. The positive wealth effects of the UPREIT structure are not fully explained as the capitalization of tax benefits.     

Bidder asymmetries in procurement auctions: Efficiency vs. information – Evidence from railway passenger services

We estimate a structural model of procurement auctions with private and common value components and asymmetric bidders using detailed contract-level data on the German market for railway passenger services. Exploiting exogenous variation in the procurement design, we disentangle the asymmetries in private costs from asymmetries in information about the common value. While each asymmetry can rationalize a firm’s dominance, understanding its source is crucial for evaluating the auction design as welfare and revenue implications depend on the source of dominance. Our results indicate that the incumbent is slightly more cost-efficient and has substantially more precise information about the common value component. If the bidders’ strategic response to the common value asymmetry were eliminated, the average probability of selecting the efficient firm would increase by 43%-points.     

Mixed duopoly, inefficiency, and public ownership

If a publicly-owned firm has a higher marginal cost than a private firm, partial public ownership may be welfare-improving, if the public firm acts is Stackelberg leader. If the private firm's marginal cost is private information a simple transfer function is truth-eliciting. If the stock market is efficient, the cost of renationalization is “small”.     

Information Generation in Vertically Differentiated Markets*

In a model of vertical competition two firms draw costly public signals that are informative about the quality of their products and then competitively set prices. When each firm generates information independently from the other, there will be overinvestment (underinvestment) in information generation if the market share of the quality follower in the subsequent market equilibrium is high (low). Moreover, information generation by one firm has a positive externality on the other firm. Hence, coordination (e.g., via industry associations) increases information generation. When product qualities are endogenous, information generation may prevent quality degradation and thus have an additional social benefit.     

Corporate Leniency Programs when Firms have Private Information: The Push of Prosecution and the Pull of Pre‐emption

A corporate leniency program provides relief from government penalties to the first member of a cartel to cooperate with the authorities. This study explores the incentives to apply for leniency when each cartel member has private information as to the likelihood that the competition authority will be able to convict them without a cooperating firm. A firm may apply for leniency because it fears being convicted (‘prosecution effect’) or because it fears another firm will apply (‘pre‐emption effect’). Policies by the competition authority to magnify concerns about pre‐emption—and thereby induce greater use of the leniency program—are also explored.     

Knowledge and information flows in supply chains: A study on pharmaceutical companies

A great deal of attention in the supply chain management literature is devoted to study material and demand information flows and their coordination. But in many situations, supply chains may convey information from different nature, they may be an important channel companies have to deliver knowledge, or specifically, technical information to the market. This paper studies the technical flow and highlights its particular requirements. Drawing upon a qualitative field research, it studies pharmaceutical companies, since those companies face a very specific challenge: consumers do not have discretion over their choices, ethical drugs must be prescribed by physicians to be bought and used by final consumers. Technical information flow is rich, and must be redundant and early delivered at multiple points. Thus, apart from the regular material channel where products and order information flow, those companies build a specialized information channel, developed to communicate to those who need it to create demand. Conclusions can be extended to supply chains where products and services are complex and decision makers must be clearly informed about technology-related information.     

Corporate governance antecedents to shareholder activism: A zero‐inflated process

Research summary: Shareholder activism has become more widespread, yet the role of corporate governance as antecedent to shareholder activism remains equivocal. We propose a new conceptual model that characterizes the stochastic of observable shareholder activism as a compound product of two latent components representing (1) shareholder activists' propensity to target a company and (2) executives' propensity to settle activists' demands privately. Our model explicitly decouples corporate governance expectations for the two latent components embedded in activism process, and thus allows us to relax assumptions of homogenous shareholder interests and constrained managerial discretion where corporate managers are expected to negotiate privately and settle only value‐creating activist demands. Bayesian analysis of zero‐inflated Poisson regression reveals that corporate governance relationships with activism vary across shareholder demands and private settlements. Managerial summary: Increasing shareholder activism has generated debates as to whether activism promotes managerial accountability and responsibility or instead encourages managerial short‐termism. Our research model allows for heterogeneous interests among a company's shareholders. We theorize and empirically investigate a broader role of corporate governance: governance mechanisms need to ensure that executives are not (1) ignoring activists' value‐increasing demands or (2) accommodating activists' value‐decreasing demands in a private, opaque manner that disenfranchises other shareholders. Our results indicate that corporate governance implications differ for visible shareholder demands in contrast with private activism. A plausible application of our model is that it provides estimates of the probability of the numbers of shareholder demands to be received by a firm and the probability of privately settling a demand. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributional assumptions in the theory of oligopoly information exchange

We analyze the profitability of information sharing among Cournot oligopolists receiving private information about random demand. In this setting, previous authors showed information exchange to be unprofitable when firms' marginal costs are constant and outputs are perfect substitutes. We introduce a measure of the increase in the accuracy of firms' demand forecasts when information is shared. We provide two examples showing when this measure is large, information exchange is profitable, even though firms' marginal costs are constant and outputs are perfect substitutes. Moreover, we show that in the linear-conditional-expectations framework, which has been standard in the literature, this measure reveals these accuracy gains to be severely limited.     

Distributional assumptions in the theory of oligopoly information exchange

We analyze the profitability of information sharing among Cournot oligopolists receiving private information about random demand. In this setting, previous authors showed information exchange to be unprofitable when firms' marginal costs are constant and outputs are perfect substitutes. We introduce a measure of the increase in the accuracy of firms' demand forecasts when information is shared. We provide two examples showing when this measure is large, information exchange is profitable, even though firms' marginal costs are constant and outputs are perfect substitutes. Moreover, we show that in the linear-conditional-expectations framework, which has been standard in the literature, this measure reveals these accuracy gains to be severely limited.     

Dynamic capabilities and strategic management

The dynamic capabilities framework analyzes the sources and methods of wealth creation and capture by private enterprise firms operating in environments of rapid technological change. The competitive advantage of firms is seen as resting on distinctive processes (ways of coordinating and combining), shaped by the firm’s (specific) asset positions (such as the firm’s portfolio of difficult-to-trade knowledge assets and complementary assets), and the evolution path(s) it has adopted or inherited. The importance of path dependencies is amplified where conditions of increasing returns exist. Whether and how a firm’s competitive advantage is eroded depends on the stability of market demand, and the ease of replicability (expanding internally) and imitatability (replication by competitors). If correct, the framework suggests that private wealth creation in regimes of rapid technological change depends in large measure on honing internal technological, organizational, and managerial processes inside the firm. In short, identifying new opportunities and organizing effectively and efficiently to embrace them are generally more fundamental to private wealth creation than is strategizing, if by strategizing one means engaging in business conduct that keeps competitors off balance, raises rival’s costs, and excludes new entrants. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Acquisitions of private vs. public firms: Private information,target selection,and acquirer returns

The acquisition of privately held firms is a prevalent phenomenon that has received little attention in mergers and acquisitions research. In this study, we examine three questions: (1) What drives the acquirer's choice between public and private targets? (2) Do acquisitions of private targets elicit a more positive stock market reaction than acquisitions of public targets, which, on average, destroy value for acquirers' shareholders? (3) Do acquirers gain when their selection of a public or private target fits the theory? In this paper, we argue that the lack of information on private targets limits the breadth of the acquirer's search and increases its risk of not evaluating properly the assets of private targets. At the same time, less information on private targets creates more value‐creating opportunities for exploiting private information, whereas the market of corporate control for public targets already serves as an information‐processing and asset valuation mechanism for all potential bidders. Using an event study and survey data, we find that: (1) acquirers favor private targets in familiar industries and turn to public targets to enter new business domains or industries with a high level of intangible assets; (2) acquirers of private targets perform better than acquirers of public targets on merger announcement, after controlling for endogeneity bias; (3) acquirers of private firms perform better than if they had acquired a public firm, and acquirers of public firms perform better than if they had acquired a private firm. These results support the expectation that acquirer returns from their target choice (private/public) are not universal but depend on the acquirer's type of search and on the merging firms' attributes. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multiple agency perspective,family control,and private information abuse in an emerging economy

Using a comprehensive sample of listed companies in Hong Kong this paper investigates how family control affects private information abuses and firm performance in emerging economies. We combine research on stock market microstructure with more recent studies of multiple agency perspectives and argue that family ownership and control over the board increases the risk of private information abuse. This, in turn, has a negative impact on stock market performance. Family control is associated with an incentive to distort information disclosure to minority shareholders and obtain private benefits of control. However, the multiple agency roles of controlling families may have different governance properties in terms of investors’ perceptions of private information abuse. These findings contribute to our understanding of the conflicting evidence on the governance role of family control within a multiple agency perspective.     

Costly interviews

In this paper, we show how the interaction between costly screening and competition in decentralized markets may prevent efficient matching. We examine this phenomenon in a simple dynamic model of a professional labor market, where firms can pay a cost to interview applicants who have private information about their own ability. Inefficiencies arise when a firm decides not to interview potentially able candidates since it infers that sufficiently good candidates will be hired by more productive firms. This effect is robust to changes in the information structure of the market, but it can be mitigated by subsidizing screening costs.     

On the vertical integration of successive monopolies

This essay studies the private incentives for, and welfare consequences of, the vertical integration of successive monopolies. When the merged firm is as efficient as its pre-merger components, private and social interests coincide and the merger raises welfare by eliminating the double mark-up. When the merger leads to higher costs it is possible that some mergers will be privately profitable but not socially desirable and that some will be socially desirable but not privately profitable. These results suggest that a laissez-faire approach to this type of merger by antitrust authorities will not always be appropriate.