Does Auctioning of Entry Licences Induce Collusion? An Experimental Study

We use experiments to examine whether the auctioning of entry rights affects the behaviour of market entrants. Standard economic arguments suggest that the licence fee paid at the auction will not affect pricing since it constitutes a sunk cost. This argument is not uncontested though, and this paper puts it to an experimental test. Our results indicate that an auction of entry licences has a significant positive effect on average prices in oligopoly but not in monopoly. These results are consistent with the conjecture that entry fees induce players to take more risk in pursuit of higher expected profits. In oligopoly, entry fees increase the probability that the market entrants coordinate on a collusive price path. In monopoly, taking more risk does not make sense since average prices are already close to the profit-maximizing price.     

Does it pay firms to register for taxes? The impact of formality on firm profitability

This paper estimates the impact of registering for taxes on firm profits in Bolivia, the country with the highest levels of informality in Latin America. A new survey of micro and small firms enables us to control for a rich set of measures of owner ability and business motivations that can affect both profits and the decision to formalize. We identify the impact of tax registration on business profitability using the distance of a firm from the tax office where registration occurs, conditional on the distance to the city center, as an instrument for registration. Proximity to the tax office provides firms with more information about registration, but is argued to not directly affect profits. We find tax registration leads to significantly higher profits for the firms that the instrument affects. However, we also find some evidence of heterogeneous effects of tax formality on profits. Tax registration appears to increase profits for the mid-sized firms in our sample, but to lower profits for both the marginal smaller and larger firms, in contrast to the standard view that formality increases profits. We show that owners of large firms who have managed to stay informal are of higher entrepreneurial ability than formal firm owners, in contrast to the standard view (correct among smaller firms) that informal firm owners are low ability.     

Does performance explain mutual fund flows in small markets? The case of Portugal

We study the performance reaction of investors in a specific small market context. Our sample includes all Portuguese open-end equity funds that invested in stocks issued by Portuguese companies in the period December 1993–June 2009. Instead of the convex flow–performance relationship usually documented for the US, we find an absence of reaction to past performance. We find no evidence to support the “smart money effect”, given that capital flows do not favour next period performance winners. We also document persistence of fund flows. Our results are consistent with the idea that large financial intermediaries have the capacity “to drive” their customers to funds with larger fees.     

Trading networks with price-setting agents

In a wide range of markets, individual buyers and sellers trade through intermediaries, who determine prices via strategic considerations. Typically, not all buyers and sellers have access to the same intermediaries, and they trade at correspondingly different prices that reflect their relative amounts of power in the market. We model this phenomenon using a game in which buyers, sellers, and traders engage in trade on a graph that represents the access each buyer and seller has to the traders. We show that the resulting game always has a subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, and that all equilibria lead to an efficient allocation of goods. Finally, we analyze trader profits in terms of the graph structure — roughly, a trader can command a positive profit if and only if it has an “essential” connection in the network, thus providing a graph-theoretic basis for quantifying the amount of competition among traders.     

Optimal Policy with Tradable and Bankable Pollution Permits: Taking the Market Microstructure into Account

This paper analyzes how the way emission permits are traded—their market microstructure—affects the optimal policy to be adopted by the environmental agency. The microstructure used is one of a quote driven market type, which characterizes many financial markets. Market makers act as intermediaries for trading the permits by setting an ask price and a bid price. The possibility of bank permits is also introduced in our dynamic two‐period model. We consider two models whether the market makers are perfectly informed about the technology of the producers or not. When the market makers have complete information, the equilibrium price of permits is the same as if the market is walrasian. When they are imperfectly informed, they may set a positive spread between bid and ask permit prices, which creates some inefficiency as the marginal abatement costs of polluters do not equalize. By allowing more flexibility in the use of the permits, banking may reduce the spread. Moreover, it may introduce price rigidities due to intertemporal arbitrage. In this framework, the circumstances under which banking should be allowed or not depend crucially on the evolution of the marginal willingness to pay for the environment.     

ENTRY REGULATIONS,WELFARE, AND DETERMINANTS OF MARKET STRUCTURE

Welfare effects of entry regulations are theoretically ambiguous in differentiated product markets. We use a dynamic oligopoly model of entry and exit with store‐type differentiation and static price setting to evaluate how entry regulations affect long‐run profitability, market structure, and welfare. Based on unique data for all retail food stores in Sweden, we estimate demand, recover variable profits, and estimate entry costs and fixed costs by store type. Counterfactual policy experiments show that welfare increases when competition is enhanced by lower entry costs. Protecting small stores by imposing licensing fees on large stores is not welfare enhancing.     

Mobile termination and collusion,revisited

The standard model by Laffont et al. (RAND Journal of Economics, 29(1): 1–37, 1998a; 38–56, 1998b) treats termination fees as an instrument to increase market power in a one-shot game of horizontal product differentiation. A prediction (Gans and King, Economics Letters, 71: 413–420, 2001) within this framework is that, with non-linear tariffs, firms should be interested in low termination fees. This seems to be at odds with regulatory experience in many countries. We offer an alternative approach, using an infinitely repeated Bertrand competition. We focus on symmetrical calling patterns and investigate simple two-part tariffs for two customer types, as well as general non-linear tariffs for two types and for a continuum of types. In this framework, when looking also at collusion in retail prices, termination fees make deviations from the collusive outcome less attractive. The optimum deviation strategy is usually to try to attract the high valuation customers since they exhibit the highest profits. Thus, a deviator will have a pool of heavy users which will have more outgoing than incoming calls, implying net termination payments. A cooperatively chosen termination rate can increase the deviator’s cost and thereby always stabilizes collusion.      

Imperfect competition in financial markets and capital structure

We consider a model of corporate finance with imperfectly competitive financial intermediaries. Firms can finance projects either via debt or via equity. Because of asymmetric information about firms’ growth opportunities, equity financing involves a dilution cost. Nevertheless, equity emerges in equilibrium whenever financial intermediaries have sufficient market power. In the latter case, best firms issue debt while the less profitable firms are equity-financed. We also show that strategic interaction between oligopolistic intermediaries results in multiple equilibria. If one intermediary chooses to buy more debt, the price of debt decreases, so the best equity-issuing firms switch from equity to debt financing. This in turn decreases average quality of equity-financed pool, so other intermediaries also shift towards more debt.     

Is Business Performance Related to the Adoption of Quality and Environmental-Related Standards?

We investigate the relationship between French firms’ business performance and registration of quality (QS) and environmental-related standards (ES). Using a propensity score matching method, we found that QS/ES registered firms report higher sales. However, registration is not significantly related to firms’ profits and EBITDA. Our findings also point out the possible synergy between ES and QS, that is, when implemented together, quality and environmental-related standards are more likely to be related to higher sales, profits and EBITDA than when only one of these standards is implemented.     

Advertising, Generic Competition and Price Regulation in Pharmaceutical Markets

The effect of price regulation on generic market entry and welfarein the presence of (persuasive) advertising is analysed. Anincumbent has the possibility to invest in advertising targetedat the physician. Advertising creates vertical product differentiationbetween brand-name drugs and its generic substitutes. This differentiationcreates the possibility to make positive profits for both firms.The presence of price regulation, however, reduces the anticipatedgeneric profits. If price regulation is too strict, then thegeneric firm will refrain from market entry. Hence, the modelconfirms the empirical observation that generic market sharesare lower in countries with strict price regulation. (JEL: I11,L13)     

Is partial privatization of universities a solution for higher education?

This paper accounts simply for the link between higher education and the productive economy through educated workers. We study a model of vertical successive monopolies where students/workers acquire qualification from a University then “sell” skilled labor to a monopoly which itself sells its final product to consumers, linking through quality the education sector to the labor and output markets. We determine the optimal share the State should keep in the University to compensate for the market imperfections, while taking into account the inefficiencies of public management. The resulting partially privatized University fixes the tuition fees so as to maximize a weighted sum of profits and social welfare. We derive the optimal public share under the hypothesis that the State may subsidize the tuition fees/University losses, then under the constraint that the University should make a nonnegative profit. We prove that in both cases, the State should keep a substantial share (higher under the first hypothesis) in the University, unless public management is too inefficient in which case the University's management should be completely private.     

INTERMEDIATED CORRUPTION

I model the role of intermediaries in corruption and examine the effects of policy on the level of intermediated corruption, price of permits, and welfare. Intermediaries with a history of being honest earn higher premiums. The frequency of corrupt transactions is inversely related to income levels. When the government increases the fraction of profits that it extracts from entrepreneurs, intermediation intensifies, as entrepreneurs are reluctant to obtain licenses through legal means. Therefore, when business costs are high, measures to combat corruption transfer value to intermediaries. Increasing the frequency of governments audits can increase the equilibrium price of permits.     

A Simple Model of Health Insurance Competition

This study investigates competition between health insurance companies under different financing regulations. We consider two alternatives advanced in recent German healthcare reform discussions: competition by contribution rates (health contributions) and by fees (health premia). We find that contribution rate competition yields lower company profits and higher consumer welfare than premia competition when switching between insurance companies is costly.     

Withholding investments in energy only markets: can contracts make a difference?

Although there are mechanisms to control market power in the spot market, withholding investments can still increase profits and hamper adequate capacity expansion. We examine the effect on investment of one suggested approach to reducing market power, contracting longer term. We construct a stylized model of an energy-only market where two firms, each specializing in one technology, invest in a first stage, contract part of their production in the second stage and sell the rest in the spot market in the third stage. We compare this model to one of an energy-only market having two stages, investment and a spot market. We find cases where the contracts change neither capacity nor peak prices, where the foreclosing effect of one player blocking the other from contracts markets increases investments and reduces prices, and where the opportunity to foreclose the market can incentivize one firm to lower its investment and increase its pricing power to the detriment of consumers. The model relies on the simplest possible assumptions of imperfect competition (subgame perfect equilibria with Cournot agents). We illustrate the different outcomes in a numerical example with two load steps (peak and off-peak) where we change one parameter, the height of the off-peak time segment. We find cases with increased and decreased capacity as well as no change in capacity. Since there is no general characterization of the consequences of contracts in this simple example, there can be no characterization in more complicated models that contain the market structures included here, and regulators or competition authorities cannot rely on contracts to induce sufficient capacity expansion by reducing market power. One other market mechanism that has been proposed to induce investment, a capacity auction with predetermined capacity requirements, is a potential alternative to limit market power that deserves further exploration to determine the extent to which it can provide an adequate incentive to invest in the presence of market power.     

A Game‐Theoretic Foundation for Competitive Equilibria in the Stiglitz–Weiss Model

Financial intermediaries are, by definition, engaged in two‐sided competition. Despite the well‐known problems of achieving competitive solutions under two‐sided price competition, models of financial intermediation are commonly solved for competitive equilibria. This article provides a game‐theoretic foundation for competitive equilibria in one of the most important models of financial intermediation, the seminal Stiglitz–Weiss (1981) adverse selection model of the credit market with a continuum of borrower types.     

High profit equilibria in directed search models

We consider a model of directed search where the sellers are allowed to post mechanisms with entry fees. Regardless of the number of buyers and sellers, the sellers are able to extract all the surplus of the buyers by introducing entry fees and making price schedules positively sloped in the number of buyers arriving to their shops. This is in contrast to results that are achieved for large markets under the assumption that sellers cannot influence the utility of any particular buyer (market utility assumption), in which case buyers obtain strictly positive rents. If there is a bound on the prices or on the entry fees that can be charged, then the equilibrium with full rent extraction does not exist any more, and the market utility assumption is restored for large markets.     

Finding "Lost" Profits: An Equilibrium Analysis of Patent Infringement Damages

We examine the impact of patent infringement damages in an equilibriumoligopoly model of process innovation where the choice to infringeis endogenous and affects market choices. Under the lost profitsmeasure of damages normally employed by U.S. courts, we findthat infringement always occurs in equilibrium with the infringingfirm making market choices that manipulate the resulting marketprofit of the patent holder. In equilibrium, infringement takesone of two forms: a "passive" form in which lost profits ofthe patent holder are zero and an "aggressive" form where theyare strictly positive. Even though the patentee's profits areprotected with the lost profits damage measure, innovation incentivesare reduced relative to a regime where infringement is deterred.