Property rights for natural resources and sustainable growth in a two-country trade model

We analyze a dynamic two-country trade model between a technological leading country and a technological follower economy. The output production in the follower economy needs a renewable natural resource as an essential input. We first prove that the innovation developed in the leading country guarantees sustainable growth in this economy. Moreover, trade of innovation also enables sustainability in the resource-dependent economy. We analyze different property rights regimes depending on whether the resource is managed by a central authority (a monopoly firm in the leading economy or the government in the follower country) or the exploitation rights are equally distributed among many harvesters in the follower country. The second main goal of the paper is to analyze how the ownership and distribution of the exploitation rights upon the natural resource may affect the sustainable growth rate for the two trading economies, the resource conservation and the consumers’ welfare. We obtain the standard result that the resource is better preserved when owned by a monopolistic agent (either a foreign firm or the government). When the property rights belong to a monopoly located in the leading country, the two economies grow faster than when they belong to either the government or many owners in the follower country. When the resource is monopoly-owned, consumers in the leading economy attain a higher welfare when the monopoly is located in this country, but the equivalent is not true for consumers in the follower economy. The comparison of welfares with the case of multiple owners is unclear.     

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.     

A process approach to understanding multiple open source innovation contests – Assessing the contest structures,execution, and participant responses in the android developer challenges

As organizations recognize the importance of open innovation, understanding emerging mechanisms for soliciting outside participation is a growing area of academic interest. Strategies can be as diverse as hosting innovation contests, sponsoring open source software (OSS) communities, or engaging in bilateral partnerships. While these have been studied as distinct strategies, more recent work has identified the possibility for combining these approaches, or deploying different methods at different times. Because each of these open innovation strategies are characterized by different incentive systems as well as different work and social practices, the combination of these can reveal unexpected participant responses (e.g., collaboration in innovation contests, competitive behavior in OSS communities). This study examines an explicit attempt to combine these strategies, to host an open source innovation contest. Through the case of Google's Android Developer Challenge, a series of multi-million dollar innovation contests used to launch an OSS community over several years, this study utilized a process approach to understanding open source innovation contests to understand how participants responded and also how the contest conditions changed over time. We found several practices of competition and collaboration that worked around the short term and long term incentives and constraints posed by the contest. We also followed the contest through various transition phases and found that participants reacted strongly to changes in structure, execution, and shifting conditions over time. Through this case, we extend our understanding of innovation contests as a process and specifically the promises and pitfalls of open source innovation contests.     

Better Late than Early: Vertical Differentiation in the Adoption of a New Technology

After the initial breakthrough in the research phase of R&D, a new product undergoes a process of change, improvement, and adaptation to market conditions. We model the strategic behavior of firms in this development phase. We emphasize that a key dimension to this competition is the innovation that leads to product differentiation and quality improvement. In a duopoly model with a single adoption choice, we derive endogenously the level and diversity of product innovations. We demonstrate the existence of equilibria in which one firm enters early with a low-quality product while the other continues to develop the technology and eventually markets a high-quality good. In such an equilibrium, no monopoly rent is dissipated and the later innovator makes more profits. Incumbent firms may well be the early innovators, contrary to the predictions of the "incumbency inertia" hypothesis.     

Innovation and the opportunity cost of monopoly

Innovation enables monopolists to lower their costs, expand their outputs, and reduce their prices. It is conventional to conclude that social welfare unambiguously increases as a result. Assuming linear demand and marginal cost, this paper shows, however, that innovation raises the opportunity cost of monopoly: as a firm enjoying market power becomes more efficient, greater amounts of surplus are sacrificed by consumers because of the progressive monopolist's failure to produce the new, larger competitive output. Innovation, in other words, increases the social value of competition by raising the deadweight cost of monopoly. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

中国金融科技:面临障碍与发展路径

金融科技是金融和科技的深度融合,随着互联网技术和大数据技术的快速发展,金融科技以颠覆式的速度和方式对传统金融进行了解构和重塑,改变了社会经济增长方式。金融科技通过加速信用资本化进程、提高金融风控能力、降低金融成本等提升了金融服务实体经济的效率,并在我国取得了快速发展,但仍面临数据隐私、数据确权、技术垄断、数据垄断、信息不对称等问题。美国、英国、新加坡等国金融科技的发展对我国具有借鉴意义,可通过加强金融消费者保护、鼓励金融科技创新、加强金融科技监管等措施促进我国金融科技的健康发展。     

Contests over joint production on networks

We consider a network of heterogeneous agents where each edge represents a two‐player contest between the respective nodes. In these bilateral contests, agents compete over an endogenous prize jointly produced using their own contest efforts. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of Nash equilibrium and characterize the equilibrium total effort for every agent. Our model has insightful results regarding the network type, that is, depending on whether the network is bipartite or nonbipartite. Finally, considering the sum of all expected utilities as an efficiency notion, we investigate the optimal network structure.     

Incentives and Selection in Promotion Contests: Is It Possible to Kill Two Birds with One Stone?

This paper investigates whether a designer can improve both the incentive provision and the selection performance of a promotion contest by making the competition more (or less) dynamic. A comparison of static (one‐stage) and dynamic (two‐stage) contests reveals that this is not the case. A structural change that improves the performance in one dimension leads to a deterioration in the other dimension. This suggests that modifications of the contest structure are an alternative to strategic handicaps. A key advantage of structural handicaps over participant‐specific ones is that the implementation of the former does not require prior identification of worker types. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A theory of multihoming in rideshare competition

We examine competition among ridesharing platforms, where firms compete on both price and the wait time induced with idled drivers. We show that when consumers are the only agents who multihome, idleness is lower in duopoly than when consumers face a monopoly ridesharing platform. When drivers and consumers multihome, idleness further falls to zero as it involves costs for each platform that are appropriated, in part, by their rival. Interestingly, socially superior outcomes may involve monopoly or competition under various multihoming regimes, depending on the density of the city, and the relative costs of idleness versus consumer disutility of waiting.     

Problem-solving effort and success in innovation contests: The role of national wealth and national culture

Innovation contests allow firms to harness specialized skills and services from globally dispersed participants for solutions to business problems. Such contests provide a rich setting for operations management (OM) scholars to explore problem solving in global labor markets as firms continue to unbundle their innovation value chains. In this study, we examine the implications of specific types of diversity in innovation contests on problem-solving effort and success. First, we conceptualize diversity among contestants in terms of national wealth (measured as gross domestic product per capita (GDPP) adjusted for purchasing power parity) and national culture (measured using the culture dimensions of performance orientation and uncertainty avoidance) and examine how such factors influence problem-solving effort. Next, we examine how differences between contestants and contest holders in terms of the above factors influence contest outcomes. Using data from a popular online innovation contest platform and country-level archival data, we find that contestants from countries with lower levels of GDPP are more likely to exert greater problem-solving effort compared to other contestants. With regard to national culture, we find that performance orientation and uncertainty avoidance have positive and negative effects, respectively, each of which weakens with increasing levels of GDPP. Finally, our analysis provides evidence of homophily effects indicating that contestants who share greater similarities with the contest holder in terms of national wealth and national culture are more likely to be successful in a contest. We discuss the implications of the study's findings for contest holders and platform owners who organize innovation contests, and for emerging research on innovation contests.     

Rent-seeking in a unionised monopoly

A unionised monopoly firm, benefitting from some kind of anti-competitive regulation, and its corresponding trade union have a common interest in spending resources to protect the monopoly rents created by the regulation. In the present paper, a situation in which the unionised monopoly is challenged by a consumer organisation fighting for deregulation is analysed as a standard Tullock rent-seeking contest. With unequal sharing of monopoly rents, the free-riding incentives among the rent-defending players turn out to be overwhelming, in the sense that the unique Nash equilibrium is characterised by zero effort contribution by the player with the lower valuation of the contested prize. This implies that being “strong”, in terms of bargaining strength, is not necessarily an advantage for neither player in a unionised monopoly that is threatened by deregulation. Received: June 2000 / accepted: January 2001     

Nonlinear pricing in spatial oligopoly

A model of duopoly competition in nonlinear pricing when firms are imperfectly informed about consumer locations is analyzed. A continuum of consumers purchase a variable amount of a product from one of two firms located at the endpoints of the market. At the Nash equilibrium in quantity-outlay schedules, consumers buy the same quantities as they would from the same firm if it were a monopolist facing the same informational asymmetries, but they receive greater surplus. Hence, no efficiency gains result from competition. If consumers have the option to reveal their locations and have the firms deliver the goods, all consumers choose to reveal their locations in equilibrium. Thus, the inefficiencies from information asymmetries may not arise because firms can deliver the good to consumers. In contrast, with a monopoly seller, consumers have no incentives to reveal their locations.     

智能管理使专卖业再蜕变

创新始终是企业发展的不竭动力。创新主要有两种方式:一是技术创新,二是管理创新,一个优秀的企业其管理创新与技术创新必然是齐头并进。信息化是推动企业管理创新和提升管理水平的重要手段,在专卖行业内越来越受到重视,在管理实践中如果能够充分借助信息技术手段,建设和运用一个科学的管理平台,那将全面深刻的感受到管理平台的变革带来的高效率。     

Firm entry,product repositioning and welfare

We show that the entry of a second firm in a horizontally differentiated market (ala Hotelling) may harm consumers as prices increase and consumer’s surplus possibly decrease. We first derive the price and the consumer’s surplus of a monopoly which is located at the center of the market. When a second firm enters the market the first firm repositions and the two firms locate at their equilibrium points. Although competition adds to variety and increases consumer’s surplus, the post entry increase in price may outweight the gains from extra variety and make consumers worse off.     

以高校学科竞赛为载体,促进应用型创新人才的培养

学科竞赛是培养创新人才的重要途径,学科竞赛不仅能够培养学生的创新能力,也能使得高校教学质量的提高。开展学科竞赛活动,要结合和贯彻教育部质量工程的精神,以此来培养高效的应用型创新人才。     

Random encounters and information diffusion about product quality

This paper explores how social interactions among consumers shape markets. In a two-country model, consumers meet and exchange information about the quality of the goods. As information spreads, demand evolves, affecting the prices and quantities manufactured by profit-maximizing firms. We show that market prices with informational frictions reach the duopoly price with full information at the limit. However, this convergence can take different paths depending on the size asymmetry between countries. In particular, when the country producing the low-quality good is relatively large, the single market does not immediately turn into a duopoly and can be temporarily trapped in a situation of price instability where no Nash equilibrium in pure (but only in mixed) strategies exists and prices can fluctuate between their monopoly and duopoly levels. It follows that the classical price-reducing effects of international trade may take longer to appear. In view of an intense globalization process, understanding how social meetings affect market outcomes is critical for understanding the performance of international economic integration.     

混合所有制改革是否有助于缓解人力资本配置扭曲

将人力资本在所有制企业间的配置扭曲（错配）理解为技术配置扭曲和规模配置扭曲两个方面，基于1998—2013年中国工业企业数据库的相关数据，探讨国有企业混合所有制改革影响人力资本配置扭曲的内生机理，结果表明：混合所有制改革鼓励非国有资本通过参股、控股和并购等方式参与到国有企业的生产决策中，这有助于完善国有企业的公司治理结构和利润分配机制，进一步缓解人力资本的技术配置扭曲和规模配置扭曲程度；相对于非行政垄断行业，行政垄断行业中国有企业混合所有制改革对于人力资本配置扭曲的缓解作用较小。     

Optimal Licensing Contracts and the Value of a Patent

We extend Kamien and Tauman's (1986) analysis of the value of a patent. We find that an inventor can always design a fixed fee plus royalty contract such that his revenue is equal to the profit a monopoly endowed with the innovation could make on the market. This implies that the social value of a patent can be strictly negative whenever the patented innovation is of bad quality. We also explain why a principal can have an interest in using performance-based contracts although the principal and the agents are risk-neutral, information is symmetric, and agents' actions are verifiable.     

Monopoly,product diversity and welfare

The more homogeneous its customers the easier it is for a monopolist to extract consumer surplus. Offering a range of product varieties (or spatial locations) sorts consumers into groups with similar preferences. The profit opportunities this yields may result in a monopoly providing more product choice than is socially optimal. Nevertheless, monopoly may be socially preferable to a free entry imperfectly competitive equilibrium.