Downstream price-cap regulation and upstream market power

Under “partial separation,” it is increasingly common for a utility’s upstream affiliate (e.g., an electric generation supplier) to be unregulated while its downstream affiliate (e.g., the distribution company offering retail service) is subject to regulation. When choosing the optimal form of downstream regulation, regulators may be confronted with the potential exercise of market power by the upstream affiliate. This paper finds that the imposition of a downstream price cap with an appropriate profit-sharing rate can eliminate the upstream affiliate’s exercise of market power. However, it is less desirable to fully mitigate affiliate market power when upstream rivals also behave strategically.      

TO REGULATE OR TO DEREGULATE? THE ROLE OF DOWNSTREAM COMPETITION IN UPSTREAM MONOPOLY VERTICALLY LINKED MARKETS

This paper attempts to cast light to the effect of monopoly regulation in Cournot markets compared to its effect in Bertrand markets. To this purpose, we use a simple model of a vertically linked market, where an upstream regulated natural monopoly is trading via two‐part tariff contracts with a downstream duopoly. Combining our results to those of the existing literature on deregulated markets, we argue that when the downstream competition is in prices, efficiency dictates regulating the monopoly with a marginal cost based pricing scheme. However, this type of regulation leads to significant welfare loss, when the downstream market is characterized by Cournot competition.     

Vertically Related Markets,Foreign Competition and Optimal Privatization Policy

This paper examines the optimal privatization policy in vertically related markets in which an upstream public firm competes with a foreign private rival in supplying a produced input to the domestic and foreign downstream firms competing in the domestic market. It shows that if the upstream public firm's market share is sufficiently high, full nationalization is optimal and the resulting profit margin is positive. However, complete privatization is never optimal. Numerical simulations reveal both the diverse optimal privatization regimes and the patterns of optimal privatization levels with varying numbers of the domestic and foreign downstream firms.     

Imperfect legal unbundling of monopolistic bottlenecks

We study an industry with a monopolistic bottleneck supplying an essential input to several downstream firms. Under legal unbundling the bottleneck must be operated by a legally independent upstream firm, which may be partly or fully owned by an incumbent active in downstream markets. Access prices are regulated but the upstream firm can perform non-tariff discrimination. Under perfect legal unbundling the upstream firm maximizes only own profits; with imperfections it is biased and to some extent accounts also for the incumbent’s downstream profits. We show that increasing the incumbent’s ownership share increases total output if the upstream firm’s bias is sufficiently small, while otherwise effects are ambiguous. Stronger regulation that reduces the bias without changing ownership shares generally increases total output. We also endogenize the bias and show that it can depend non-monotonically on the ownership share.     

Export rivalry,vertically-related markets,and optimal public ownership policy

This paper considers the optimal public ownership policy of an upstream firm which competes with a foreign private rival. Both firms supply a produced input to the domestic and foreign downstream firms that compete in an export market. The paper shows that complete privatization of the domestic upstream firm is never optimal. It will likely be fully nationalized if its market share is high, the domestic downstream firms' market share is low, and the total number of firms in the downstream is large. Simulation results reveal that the public firm's optimal profit margin may be negative and that the government ownership level may exhibit a reswitching phenomenon as the number of domestic downstream firms keeps growing. The paper sheds light on the possibility of using government ownership policy as a pseudo-trade and industrial policy.     

Market Games in Successive Oligopolies

This paper introduces a new approach to successive oligopolies. We draw on market games à la Shapley–Shubik to examine how successive oligopolies operate between downstream and upstream markets when the input price is determined by the action of all firms, downstream and upstream both. This approach differs from the classical one as it allows us to consider downstream firms that exercise market power both in both downstream and upstream markets. We perform a comparison of the market outcome with each scenarios as well as a welfare analysis.     

Trade and product market policies in upstream sectors and productivity in downstream sectors: Firm-level evidence from China

This paper explores the heterogeneous productivity impact of trade, product market and financial market policies over the last decade in China. The paper makes a critical distinction between downstream and upstream industries, focusing on the indirect effects of regulation in upstream industries on firm performance in downstream manufacturing industries. We identify the differential effect of these policies on firm productivity growth depending on how far incumbents are relative to the technological frontier. Trade and product market reforms are found to deliver stronger gains for firms that are closer to the industry-level technological frontier, while the reverse holds for financial market reforms. The key conclusion that can be derived from the empirical analysis is that further product, trade and financial market reforms would bring substantial gains in China and could therefore speed up the convergence process. Taken at face value, the empirical estimates would imply that aligning product, trade and financial market regulation to the average level observed in OECD countries would bring aggregate manufacturing productivity gains of respectively 9%, 3% and 6.5% after 5 years.     

On intrabrand and interbrand competition: The strategic role of fees and royalties

We examine oligopolistic markets with both intrabrand and interbrand competition. We characterize equilibrium contracts involving a royalty (or wholesale price) and a fee when each upstream firm contracts with multiple downstream firms. Royalties control competition between own downstream firms at the expense of making them passive against rivals. When the number of downstream firms is endogenous, each upstream firm chooses to have only one downstream firm. This result is in sharp contrast to previous literature where competitors benefit by having a larger number of independent downstream firms under only fixed fee payments. We discuss why allowing upstream firms to charge per-unit payments in addition to fixed fees dramatically alters their strategic incentives.     

Incentives for input foreclosure

We analyze the incentives of a vertically integrated firm to foreclose downstream rivals in a model of upstream price competition between suppliers of only imperfectly substitutable inputs. Our main motivation is a critical assessment of common assertions that draw inferences from pre-merger observable variables to post-merger incentives to foreclose. In particular, we find that, contrary to some commonly expressed views, high margins on the downstream and low margins on the upstream market are not good predictors for the incentives of a newly integrated firm to foreclose rivals. Besides this contribution to policy, our model also extends existing results in the literature on vertical foreclosure through allowing for the interaction of product differentiation on the upstream and on the downstream market.     

Insurance with Frequency Trading: A Dynamic Analysis of Efficient Insurance Markets

This paper extends existing insurance results on the type of insurance contracts needed for insurance market efficiency to a dynamic setting. It introduces continuously open markets that allow for more efficient asset allocation. It also estimates the role of preferences and endowments in the classification of risks, which is done primarily in terms of the actuarial properties of the underlying risk process. The paper further extends insurability to include correlated and catastrophic events. Under these very general conditions the paper defines a condition that determines whether a small number of standard insurance contracts (together with aggregate assets) suffice to complete markets or one needs to introduce such assets as mutual insurance. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D81, D99, G11.     

Strategic spin-offs of input divisions

When a downstream producer enters backward into the input market, a “helping the rivals effect” exists: Such entry hurts the firm's downstream business as it increases upstream competition and thus benefits its rival downstream firms. This negative externality prevents the newly-created upstream unit from expanding. A spin-off enables the firm to credibly expand in the input market, thereby forcing its upstream competitors to behave less aggressively. Spin-offs occur in equilibrium if and only if the number of downstream firms exceeds a threshold level. When there is more than one integrated firm, a spin-off by a firm can trigger spin-offs by others that would not occur otherwise.     

Market share determination in marketing service industries - A demand side approach∗

A marketing service industry provides its business clients with its services such as advertising media or inbound telecommunication ( i.e. toll free 800 calls) to increase their sales. By extending Dorfman and Steiner (1954) to the world where firms obtain costly marketing services from outside specialized providers, this paper studies the market shares of providers of a marketing service from the perspective of their clients. It derives that at the optimal point for a representative client, a provider's market share equals the ratio of the profits contributed by its service to the total profits contributed by the services of all providers in the market. Under certain conditions, a provider's market share is just a function of quality-price ratios. This result should facilitate choosing a marketing service from alternative providers and analyzing market shares in marketing-service industries.     

Product Market Competition in Transition Economies: Increasing Varieties and Consumer Loyalty

This paper analyzes product market competition between foreign entrants and former SOEs in transition markets with respect to expansion of product variety and consumer loyalty formation. While the market share motive induces the more efficient foreign entrant to price aggressively, the extent of this behavior depends critically on its relative efficiency vis-à-vis the local incumbent. If the efficiency gap exceeds some threshold value, the entrant exploits increasingly its cost advantages by raising price rather than investing in market share. Our result suggests that immediate restructuring of former SOEs is important to realize fully the competitive benefits of opening local markets.J. Comp. Econom., December 2000, 28(4), pp. 700–715. International Monetary Fund, 700 19th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20431.     

R&D policy in a vertically related industry

In this paper, we analyze the effectiveness of public policy aimed to stimulate business-performed R&D in a vertically related market. We examine the role of an R&D active upstream supplier in a four-stage R&D model, where we incorporate public funding. The considered policy instrument is direct funding of firms’ R&D efforts. We calculate the optimal policies and show that they have a positive impact on firms’ R&D investments. From a welfare point of view, it is optimal to differentiate the subsidy rates between the upstream and the downstream markets. Competition in the product market leads to a higher subsidy rate to the upstream supplier than to the downstream firms. When concentration is high in the downstream market, the optimal solution is an R&D subsidy for these firms, otherwise the optimal solution is an R&D tax for the downstream firms.     

Upstream and downstream pollution taxations in vertically related markets with imperfect competition

When two markets are vertically related, the government can control pollution at the upstream as well as the downstream market levels. This paper employs the stylized model of input price discrimination and compares the effectiveness of upstream and downstream pollution taxations. We consider the situation in which downstream firms have heterogeneous abatement technologies and an upstream monopolist performs input price discrimination against them. In order to mitigate pollution, the government imposes input tax on the intermediate inputs and emission tax on the pollutant. We show that the degree of input price discrimination decreases with a rise in the input tax and increases with a rise in the emission tax. We further examine the effect of a green tax reform in which the government changes the source of taxation from input tax to emission tax. We argue that although this green tax reform may reduce the tax revenue of the government, it will certainly increase social welfare.      

Modeling the welfare effects of net neutrality regulation: A Comment on Economides and Tåg

In a recent article in Information Economics and Policy Economides and Tåg (2012), analyze a theoretical model of two-sided markets designed to assess the welfare effects of net neutrality. According to the model, the only unambiguous beneficiaries of net neutrality regulation are content providers. Consumers are unambiguously worse off under net neutrality, while the effect on platform operators is ambiguous. In the aggregate, net neutrality may be either surplus-enhancing or surplus-reducing, because the gains to content providers (and possibly platform operators) may or may not outweigh the losses to consumers (and possibly platform operators), depending on whether certain parameter restrictions are satisfied. However, these restrictions are difficult to interpret, given that the structural parameters lack real-world analogs. In this Comment, I demonstrate that the assumptions underlying the authors’ surplus-enhancing result imply a straightforward and testable hypothesis. Specifically, I show that the ratio of aggregate content provider profits to aggregate platform operator profits must be strictly less than 0.4 under net neutrality for the surplus-enhancing result to hold. For many parameter values, the upper bound to the profit ratio is significantly lower. Finally, I provide a brief empirical assessment of the relative profitability of content providers and ISPs. The balance of the empirical evidence reviewed provides little basis for assuming that the relative profitability constraint implied by the model is satisfied in practice.     

Stochastic Relation between Money and Capital in an Economy with Spatially Separated Markets

This paper examines the stochastic relationship between money and capital in an economy with spatially separated markets. The new ingredient of the model is that trades between markets may be desirable but are eliminated by market separation. When this cross-market friction is operative, aggregate capital is negatively correlated with and only with contemporaneous money growth, given past capital stocks. When the cross-market friction is not operative, aggregate capital can be positively correlated with contemporaneous money growth and current money growth has direct predictive power on future aggregate capital through its effect on the distribution of capital among agents. Therefore, in a more fragmented economy, aggregate capital is more likely to be negatively correlated with money growth and more unpredictable by past money growth.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: E40, E50     

Exchange-rate pass-through and market structure

We consider a situation in whichn firms located in market 1 andm firms located in market 2 each sell a commodity which is homogeneous within each market but may differ between markets. All firms sell on both markets. Each market has its own currency. The market demand functions differ. We give some basic results on the effects of exchange-rate changes and then show the following. When these markets are independent on the cost side (constant marginal costs) and demands are linear, a reduction in the number of firms (which might result from a merger) in market 1 increases the pass-through (of an appreciation of currency 2) in market 1 and decreases the pass-through in market 2. A similar occurrence in market 2 has the opposite effect. We give conditions under which, with identical economies of scope linking the markets, the sign of the price changes will be reversed when the number of foreign firms is small enough compared to the number of local firms. However, such sign reversals cannot occur in the two markets simultaneously.     

SYNCHRONISING DEREGULATION IN PRODUCT AND LABOUR MARKETS

Deregulation typically comes with redistribution of rents and thus with opposition from the losing interest groups. We show that, by exploiting complementarities, synchronising deregulation across markets makes this opposition lower. Indeed, a particular deregulation may reduce rents for one interest group, but may result in gains for another interest group. Synchronising reforms can therefore offer a way out of the ‘sclerosis’ of especially European markets. For this effect, we build a microeconomic model based on two assumptions: Cournot competition à la Vives in the product markets and firms hiring workers in accordance with an efficiency wage in the labour markets. As being particularly relevant for European economies, we focus on product market regulation that determines the degree of market integration and labour market regulation that determines the degree of employment protection.     

The NAIRU reconsidered: why labour market deregulation may raise unemployment

According to the mainstream theory of equilibrium unemployment, persistent unemployment is caused mainly by ‘excessive’ labour market regulation, whereas aggregate demand, capital accumulation and technological progress have no lasting effect on unemployment. We show that the mainstream non‐accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (NAIRU) model is a special case of a general model of equilibrium unemployment, in which aggregate demand, investment and endogenous technological progress do have long‐term effects. It follows that labour market deregulation does not necessarily reduce steady‐inflation unemployment. Theoretically, if the decline in real wage growth claims owing to deregulation is smaller than the ensuing decline in labour productivity growth and in the warranted real wage growth, then in that case steady‐inflation unemployment may increase. Empirical evidence for 20 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (1984–1997) indicates that the impact of labour market deregulation on OECD unemployment is zero, and possibly negative (causing a higher rate of unemployment).