Competition in a Dynamic Auction Market: Identification,Structural Estimation,and Market Efficiency

The model incorporates an infinite series of auctions for identical items (or close substitutes) ordered over time and bidders with unit demand. The participants of each auction are drawn from a dynamic pool, with losing bidders remaining in the pool of potential bidders. The number of bidders in each auction is unobservable. Risk‐neutral, forward‐looking bidders submit bids below valuation. A novel identification and estimation strategy is used to estimate the valuation distribution from an order statistic of the bids. The model is used to evaluate the efficiency of online auctions for a 60GB Apple iPod Video, compared to a perfect‐competition benchmark.     

Group Profit,Market Share and Efficiency: Evidence from Australian Manufacturing

This paper explains the intra-industry variations of profit in Australian manufacturing. Considering three groups of firms, viz leading, secondary and follower groups, a profit model is developed for each group. Indicators of ``strategic behavior' and ``efficiency' are considered along with other control variables. Both equilibrium and dynamic versions of the model are tested using unpublished data at the enterprise level between 1977/78 and 1992/93. The findings support the importance of both strategic behavior and efficiency in determining group profits.     

国际钢铁企业利润率、市场集中度和经营效率分析

通过实证检验发现:世界钢铁行业集中度与行业平均税前销售利润率之间的线性相关性不显著,二者之间可能存在一种非线性的关系;国际钢铁公司的规模大小与其税前利润率高低没有显著的关系;国际钢铁公司的利润率与其经营效率有很强的正相关性.因此,钢铁企业自身的经营效率才是决定企业盈利能力的关键因素.     

网络效应、消费偏好与标准竞争

完全信息静态标准竞争可能产生三种市场格局：技术标准市场不存在、个体标准并存、强势标准阻止弱势标准进入。强制标准化的错误来自两个方面：选择了错误的个体标准即弱势个体标准的标准化，错误地选择了标准化，即优势个体标准的标准化市场的社会福利低于竞争市场的社会福利。     

Partnerships, Profit Sharing, and Quality Competition in the Medical Profession

This paper contains a theoretical model of medicalpartnerships with individual quantity and qualitychoice. The firm selects price, the number ofpartners and profit sharing. The firm encouragesinter-firm quality competition and discouragesintra-firm quality competition through differentialprofit sharing. An empirical model using data from anationwide survey of medical practices supports thetheoretical results. Further, empirical resultssupport the view that time per visit can be used as aproxy index for quality in the primary carephysician market.     

X-Inefficiency,Competition and Market Information

Whether competition forces firms toward efficient behaviour is an open question. We consider a duopoly with firms run by managers and affected by adverse selection on costs. In contrast to recent literature, we point out that, to have a genuine effect on firm X-inefficiency, competition must change managerial incentives. By introducing the availability of some signal on the rivals' behaviour we show that, if costs are correlated, the contractual use of that signal can render private managerial information uninfluential. This result stresses the informational role of the market and suggests scope for future work.     

The Effects of Megamergers on Efficiency and Prices: Evidence from a Bank Profit Function

This paper examines the efficiency and price effects of mergers by applying a frontier profit function to data on bank megamergers. We find that merged banks experience a statistically significant 16 percentage point average increase in profit efficiency rank relative to other large banks. Most of the improvement is from increasing revenues, including a shift in outputs from securities to loans, a higher-valued product. Improvements were greatest for the banks with the lowest efficiencies prior to merging, who therefore had the greatest capacity for improvement. By comparison, the effects on profits from merger-related changes in prices were found to be very small.     

Competition,Prices and Quality in the Market for Physician Consultations

Prices for consultations with General Practitioners (GP's) in Australia are unregulated, and patients pay the difference between the price set by the GP and a fixed reimbursement from the national tax‐funded Medicare insurance scheme. We construct a Vickrey‐Salop model of GP price and quality competition and test its predictions using individual GP‐level data on prices, the proportion of patients who are charged no out‐of‐pocket fee, average consultation length, and characteristics of the GP's, their practices and their local areas. We measure the competition to which the GP is exposed by the distance to other GP practices and allow for the endogeneity of GP location decisions with measures of area characteristics and area fixed‐effects. Within areas, GP's with more distant competitors charge higher prices and a smaller proportion of their patients make no out‐of‐pocket payment. GP's with more distant competitors also have shorter consultations, though the effect is small and statistically insignificant.     

Real Estate Brokers, Nonprice Competition and the Housing Market

Given a fixed commission rate and easy entry, economic profits must be competed away on some nonprice margin in the real estate brokerage market. This paper focuses on nonprice competition in the level or quality of services offered buyers and sellers in the market, examining the equilibrium adjustment process, comparative static predictions and efficiency implications. In contrast with earlier studies focusing on wasteful advertising, this paper demonstrates that higher commission rates can either increase or decrease deadweight loss, depending upon how broker services affect buyer and seller transaction costs.     

Internet Search Behavior,Liquidity and Prices in the Housing Market

We employ detailed internet search data to examine price and liquidity dynamics of the Dutch housing market. We show that the number of clicks on properties listed online proxies demand and the number of listed properties proxies supply. From this internet search behavior, we create a market tightness indicator and we find that this indicator Granger causes changes in both house prices and housing market liquidity. The results of a panel VAR suggest that a demand shock results in a temporary increase in liquidity and a permanent increase in prices in urban areas. This is in accordance with search and matching models.     

审计市场中的合并、产业专用化投资和价格竞争

本文从产业组织的角度，分析了审计市场的合并、产业专用化和价格竞争等竞争行为，并进一步探讨了这些行为对审计质量和社会福利的影响。本文认为，审计质量的信号传递机制推动了产业中的合并行为，而审计产业的专用化投资行为在于策略性地阻止进入。由于审计产品的异质性、信任品特性以及强大的买方谈判能力使得审计市场存在激烈的价格竞争，而合并和产业专用化投资有助于事务所降低成本。因而，审计市场的竞争提高了社会福利。     

开放平台与所有权平台的竞争:网络效应与策略选择

开放平台（标准）的出现给所有权平台带来很大冲击，也给经济学家提出了挑战．这种免费的资源提供的动机何在？它对创新活动有何影响？它会如何影响市场竞争的结果？本文提供了一个分析开放平台和所有权平台（双寡）竞争的理论模型，在考虑网络效应以及所有权平台拥有者的兼容策略选择等情形下。分析了不同平台的目标和均衡策略选择。在此基础上。我们还拓展分析了社会对不同产业结构（开放＋所有权VS所有权＋所有权）的选择激励．结果发现不同的参数设定会得到不同的结论。     

Competition in Korean mobile telecommunications market: business strategy and regulatory environment

After the launch of PCS in 1997, the Korean mobile telephony market achieved a remarkable subscriber base growth. The market is composed of a differentiation advantage seeker, SK Telecom; a cost advantage seeker, LG Telecom; and three other carriers: Hansol PCS, Korea Telecom Freetel, and Shunsegi Telecom that do not show clear adherence to any type of advantage. Despite large growth in subscribers, price competition has not occurred after the competition except in handset subsidies. New restrictions on handset subsidies, closing the only door for price competition, favored a differentiation seeker at the expense of a cost advantage seeker. The Ministry of Information and Communication’s provisional plan for quality evaluation without price deregulation runs the risk of quality over-provision that is sub-optimal, and may further distort the business performance of carriers. Overall complete deregulation is necessary, in order to enhance the competitiveness of the Korean mobile telephony industry and to increase consumer welfare.     

Effects of FTA Provisions on the Market Structure of the Korean Automobile Industry

The Korean passenger car market is dominated by a few domestic producers. In this paper, we investigate whether this market structure is the result of import tariffs and taxes that penalize foreign manufacturers. Our counterfactual simulation under two FTA scenarios shows that the market shares of imported and domestic cars show minimal adjustments, suggesting that import tariffs and taxes may not explain the lack of penetration of import cars in Korea. We predict changes in consumer surplus and discuss the policy implications of our findings.     

Efficiency in the Mortgage Market: The Borrower's Perspective

This paper uses mortgage history data from the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation to analyze the prepayment behavior of homeowners and to test whether borrowers exercise their prepayment options in a manner consistent with contingent claims models. A variety of hazard models are estimated from individual data on more than 6000 mortgages issued during the 1976–1980 period. In these models, it is clear that the extent to which the prepayment option is "in the money" has a strong effect on behavior. However, it is less clear that the option is exercised quite as ruthlessly as the theory predicts.     

Market Power,Efficiency and the Dispersion of Systematic Risk

A number of studies have used the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) to integrate product market and financial theories of the firm. We reexamine the relationship between product market structure and systematic risk at the firm and industry level. We show that theory yields no testable implications at the firm level. We show, however, that there is a relationship between the intraindustry dispersion of systematic risk and industry concentration which depends on the causes and consequences of concentration. Estimates of the relationship between the intraindustry variance of and concentration for a 1987 cross-section of U.S. industries suggest that concentration allows larger firms to exercise market power.     

Pricing Efficiency in the Mortgage Market

Traditionally, the presence of serial correlation has been presumed to indicate an inefficient market for financial assets. As Latham [15] discusses, while the absence of serial correlation implies market efficiency, its mere presence does not imply inefficiency. Rather, market efficiency is a characteristic of security pricing. This study investigates pricing efficiency in the mortgage market. Using mortgage loan quotations for 343 institutions over a 71-week period, the empirical findings show that a wide variety of mortgage contracts are efficiently priced.     

Product Market Competition,Executive Compensation,and CEO Family Ties

Review of Industrial Organization - This paper analyzes the interaction between product market competition and family ties on the structure of CEO pay, in a panel of publicly listed family firms....     

Digging Deep to Compete: Vertical Integration,Product Market Competition and Prices

This article establishes a causal effect of product market competition on vertical integration. I exploit a hitherto unexplored natural experiment in the U.S. coal mining industry and a unique mine‐level organizational data set. Following an exogenous increase in product market competition, the incidence of vertical integration fell by 33% within the treatment group relative to the counterfactual. I find novel evidence that transition to the lower degree of vertical integration is driven by competition's reducing market prices by 32% which decreased the incentive to conduct vertical mergers. I discuss several possible interpretations of these changes.