Monopolistic competition and non-neighboring-goods

Summary This paper studies price games played by a continuum of differentiated producers who face demands generated by additively separable preferences exhibiting a non-neighboring goods property. The examples of exact equilibria show that an asymmetric Chamberlian outcome is compatible with nonzero profits for nonmarginal firms and also with constant average costs, contrary to long sustained views. The paper tries also to short out the structure behind this class of examples and identify as general features the presence of nonperfectly elastic demands facing individual firms and the existence of an approximate Chamberlinian equilibrium.I am indebted to J. Ostroy for very helpful comments and to L. Jones, P. Romer and W. Zame for several conversations.     

Monopolistic equilibrium and involuntary unemployment

This note provides a simple example of an economy in which involuntary unemployment may be the consequence of monopolistic behavior on the product market.     

Monopolistic competition and income dispersion

We develop a model of monopolistic competition that accounts for consumers’ heterogeneity in both incomes and preferences. This model makes it possible to study the implications of income redistribution on the toughness of competition. We show how the market outcome depends on the joint distribution of consumers’ tastes and incomes and obtain a closed-form solution for a symmetric equilibrium. Competition toughness is measured by the weighted average elasticity of substitution. Income redistribution generically affects the market outcome, even when incomes are redistributed across consumers with different tastes in a way such that the overall income distribution remains the same.     

Monopolistic competition or spatial competition or something else: Empirical evidence

There is a voluminous literature on models of spatial and monopolistic competition but little indication of the actual importance of these models. Many markets show a large number of differentiated products, and yet it is possible that there are significant neighbor effects making the application of the monopolistic competition model invalid. The question of neighbor effects is at the core of the paper. Using data from Consumer Reports, and a definition of neighbors, 127 markets are analyzed. The pure cases of spatial and monopolistic competition theory are found to be rare but approximations may exist. There is evidence that a substantial number of markets do not conform to the prototypes suggested by theory, and a redirection of theoretical effort would seem to be warranted.     

Monopolistic competition and the cyclicality of pricing and productivity—A typology of industries

We develop a market model which explains how prices and productivity react to short-run demand variations when the number of price-setting firms is held fixed on its long-run level and profits are endogenous. We assume that for each firm the average production cost function is U-shaped, that customers are imperfectly informed about offer prices, and that customers may search for better offers.For low degrees of market transparency the long-run market outcome exhibits price dispersion with an endogenous finite number of firms. In this case, in the short run, prices and price mark-ups respond countercyclically to demand variations (while input prices are exogenously fixed) and productivity is procyclical. In the complementary case of higher degrees of market transparency, in the long run we have a single-price equilibrium. In that case, in the short run, prices are procyclical while mark-ups remain countercyclical and productivity diminishes with any deviation of demand from its long-run level.Thanks for helpful discussions go to the participants of workshops at the Winter Symposium of the Econometric Society at Warsaw 1990, at the 6th World Congress of the Econometric Society at Barcelona 1990, at the Annual Meetings of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Lugano 1991 and of its Ausschuß für Industrieökonomik in Basel 1992, and at several university workshops. Thanks go also to two anonymous referees. Financial support by the Swiss National Science Foundation, grants No 12-26387.89 and 12-28722.90, are gratefully acknowledged.     

Cooperation vs. competition in R&D: The role of stability of equilibrium

We consider a model in which firms first choose process R&D expenditures and then compete in an output market. We show the symmetric equilibrium under R&D competition is sometimes unstable, in which case two asymmetric equilibria must also exist. For the latter, we find, in contrast to the literature that total profits are sometimes higher with R&D competition than with research joint venture cartelization (due to the cost asymmetry of the resulting duopoly in the noncooperative case). Furthermore, these equilibria provide another instance of R&D-induced firm heterogeneity.     

Monopolistic competition,aggregation of competitive information,and the amount of product differentiation

Consider an industry with a large number of homogeneous firms. Each firm's profits are a function of its own strategy and the strategies the other firms select. Suppose other firms' strategies enter into each firm's profit function only through one or more statistics. For example, average price in the market may parameterize every firm's profit function. We prove that, as a general rule, the industry's firms will in equilibrium follow at most M + 1 distinct strategies, where M is the number of statistics by which competitors' strategies affect each firm's profits.     

Monopolistic competition and optimum product selection: Why and how heterogeneity matters

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility, variable demand elasticity and endogenous firm heterogeneity cause the market equilibrium to err in many ways, concerning the number of products, the size and the choice of producers, the overall size of the monopolistically competitive sector. More crucially with respect to the existing literature, we also show that the extent of the errors depends on the degree of firm heterogeneity. In particular, the inefficiency of the market equilibrium is largest when selection among heterogenous firms is needed most, that is, when there are relatively many firms with low productivity and relatively few firms with high productivity.     

On the stability of the stackelberg oligopoly equilibrium

The stability of the equilibrium in the Stackelberg undifferentiated oligopoly model where each oligopolist strives for leadership is analyzed for general demand and cost functions and for a discrete system with non-instantaneous adjustment.     

Catalog competition and Nash equilibrium in nonlinear pricing games

We model strategic competition in a market with asymmetric information as a noncooperative game in which each seller competes for a buyer of unknown type by offering the buyer a catalog of products and prices. We call this game a catalog game. Our main objective is to show that catalog games have Nash equilibria. The Nash existence problem for catalog games is particularly contentious due to payoff discontinuities caused by tie-breaking. We make three contributions. First, we establish under very mild conditions on primitives that no matter what the tie-breaking rule, catalog games are uniformly payoff secure, and therefore have mixed extensions which are payoff secure. Second, we show that if the tie-breaking rule awards the sale to firms which value it most (i.e., breaks ties in favor of firms which stand to make the highest profit), then firm profits are reciprocally upper semicontinuous (i.e., the mixed catalog game is reciprocally upper semincontinuous). This in turn implies that the mixed catalog game satisfies Reny’s condition of better-reply security—a condition sufficient for existence (Reny in Econometrica 67:1029–1056, 1999). Third, we show by example that if the tie-breaking rule does not award the sale to firms which value it most (for example, if ties are broken randomly with equal probability), then the catalog game has no Nash equilibrium. This paper was written while the second author was Visiting Professor, Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, Universite Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne. The second author thanks CES and Paris 1, and in particular, Bernard Cornet and Cuong Le Van for their support and hospitality. The second author also thanks the C&BA and EFLS at the University of Alabama for financial support. Both authors are grateful to Monique Florenzano and to participants in the April 2006 Paris 1 NSF/NBER Decentralization Conference for many helpful comments on an earlier version of the paper. Finally, both authors are especially grateful to an anonymous referee whose thoughtful comments led to substantial improvements in the paper. Monteiro acknowleges the financial support of Capes-Cofecub 468/04.     

The competition and equilibrium analysis of LCD TV and PDP TV

This study has investigated the dynamic competitive relationship between PDP TVs and LCD TVs by means of their quarterly shipments. The renowned Lotka-Volterra competition diffusion model has been adopted to conduct the empirical analysis with the Lyapunov function to carry out equilibrium and stability analysis, and estimate the domain of attraction which describes the trend and phenomenon of TV shipments. The results illustrate that there is good fitting performance while adopting this model. The competitive relationship can be viewed from the perspective that the LCD TV is the prey while the PDP TV is the predator. The possibility, nevertheless, for dropping the price of LCD TVs is an advantage of the attractiveness of the product which can be noted in higher growth rate than PDP TVs. With respect to the equilibrium stability analysis and estimated domain of attraction, 40- to 49-inch PDP TVs will not disappear from the market, but will generate a stable equilibrium with LCD TVs and sales volume presents simultaneous increase or decrease. In the supply and demand analysis, LCD TVs present a surplus of supply from 2008; therefore, how to conduct appropriate inventory management will be an emerging issue.     

Introduction to the stability of rational expectations equilibrium

This paper surveys the literature which examines the stability of the expectations that agents are assumed to have in a rational expectations equilibrium (REE). This issue is more complex than the usual statistical estimation problem because the relationship between observable variables and payoff relevant variables is endogenous. One approach taken in the literature yields convergence to a REE but requires agents to have extensive knowledge about the structure and dynamics of the model that prevails while they learn. A second approach does not assume that agents have correctly specified likelihood functions and finds that REE may not be stable.     

战略管理、制度依赖与行业竞争力——中国烟草行业实证分析

本文所指行业竞争力是指由行业整体盈利状况和核心企业竞争优势支撑起来的生存与发展能力。自1982年中国烟草总公司成立和1983年《烟草专卖条例》颁布实施以来,烟草行业主要依靠法律引人和行政命令,通过计划指标、许可证管制和各级烟草专卖机构,自上而下地建立了“统一领导、垂直管理、专卖专营”的国家烟草专卖制度。     

The impact of bank competition and concentration on industrial growth

This paper studies whether bank competition affects growth of non-banking industries. We find that non-cooperative bank competition and stability promote industrial growth robustly. Bank concentration may also affect growth positively; the latter effect increases for higher levels of competition.     

Foreign direct investment, competition and industrial development in the host country

This paper analyses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of local firms. We focus on two likely effects of FDI: A competition effect which deters entry of domestic firms and positive market externalities which foster the development of local industry. Using a simple theoretical model to illustrate how these forces work we show that the number of domestic firms follows a u-shaped curve, where the competition effect first dominates but is gradually outweighed by positive externalities. Evidence for Ireland tends to support this result. Specifically, applying semi-parametric regression techniques on plant level panel data for the manufacturing sector we find that while the competition effect may have initially deterred local firms’ entry, this initial effect has been outpaced by positive externalities making the overall impact of FDI largely positive for the domestic industry.     

Long-term industrial equilibrium in an ITQ managed fishery

This paper discusses long-term equilibrium in a fishery managed by individual transferable quotas. Rising prices or falling capital costs become capitalized in a higher value of quotas, implying higher capital costs for holding quotas. This may in fact reduce the size of each firm and lead to more firms existing in long-term equilibrium. Resource rent taxation by letting firms lose a certain share of their quota holdings each year is discussed and shown to be neutral.     

General equilibrium models of monopolistic competition: A new approach

We analyze a class of ‘large group’ Chamberlinian monopolistic competition models by applying different concepts of functional separability to the same set of first-order conditions for utility maximization. We show that multiplicatively quasi-separable (MQS) functions yield ‘constant relative risk aversion’ (CRRA), and, therefore ‘constant elasticity of substitution’ (CES), functions, whereas additively quasi-separable (AQS) functions yield ‘constant absolute risk aversion’ (CARA) functions. We then show that the CARA specification sheds new light on: (i) pro-competitive effects, i.e., profit-maximizing prices are decreasing in the mass of competing firms; and (ii) a competitive limit, i.e., profit-maximizing prices converge to marginal costs when the mass of competing firms becomes arbitrarily large.