Comments on: “Structural vs. atheoretic approaches to econometrics” by Michael Keane

My comments on the keynote paper by Michael Keane.     

Structural vs. atheoretic approaches to econometrics

In this paper I attempt to lay out the sources of conflict between the so-called “structural” and “experimentalist” camps in econometrics. Critics of the structural approach often assert that it produces results that rely on too many assumptions to be credible, and that the experimentalist approach provides an alternative that relies on fewer assumptions. Here, I argue that this is a false dichotomy. All econometric work relies heavily on a priori assumptions. The main difference between structural and experimental (or “atheoretic”) approaches is not in the number of assumptions but the extent to which they are made explicit.     

Comments on “An analysis of the international tourism demand in Spain” by P. González and P. Moral

Although the state-space, unobserved component approach to forecasting has many advantages, it must be applied carefully in practice and should not be used in an uncritical, ‘black box’ fashion. In particular, such an approach to the modelling and forecasting of Spanish tourism data is inappropriate and leads to misleading conclusions, particularly in relation to the uncritical selection and use of explanatory regression variables.     

Selling shares to retail investors: auction vs. fixed price

We analyze the problem of selling shares of a divisible good to a large number of buyers when demand is uncertain. We characterize equilibria of two popular mechanisms, a fixed price mechanism and a uniform price auction, and compare the revenues. While in the auction truthful bidding is a dominant strategy, we find that bidders have an incentive to overstate their demand in the fixed price mechanism. For some parameter values we find that the fixed price mechanism outperforms the auction.     

Licensing vs. Litigation: The Effect of the Legal System on Incentives to Innovate

With uncertain scope of patent protection and imperfect enforcement, the effective strength of patent protection is determined by the legal system. We analyze how the legal system affects the incentives of firms to innovate, taking into account possibilities of strategic licensing and litigation to deter imitation. The legal system that guarantees the patentee's monopoly power maximizes the R&D intensities. However, the legal system that induces licensing provides incentives to exert R&D effort while preserving ex post efficiency. We also compare R&D, patent licensing, and litigation behavior under American and English rules of legal cost allocation.