Non-existence of Duopoly Equilibria: A Simple Numerical Example

We give a simple example to the non-existence of duopoly equilibrium in pure strategies in an economy with two goods and two types of consumers. This extends also the discussion on the incentive for trade in an oligopolistic framework initiated in Cordella and Gabszewicz (1998).     

The welfare cost of imperfect competition and distortionary taxation

The welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product and labor markets in the United States is quantified in a dynamic general equilibrium model. We find that the welfare cost of imperfect competition in the product market is 3.62 percent while it is 0.58 percent in the labor market, taking the transition path from the distorted to the optimal steady state into account. If we also take into account that the US economy is characterized by distortionary taxation, the welfare cost of the product market distortion increases to 13.51 percent and the labor market distortion to 4.35 percent.     

Increasing returns,entrepreneurship and imperfect competition

We study a simple bilateral oligopoly model in which individual agents, who are initially endowed with capital, decide sequentially (1) whether they want to act as producers (entrepreneurs) or as capital lenders (rentiers) and, then (2) which quantity of capital they would like to borrow or lend, though exchange of capital units against units of the produced good. Production takes place under increasing returns to scale. We show the existence of “natural equilibria”, at which wealthier capital owners become entrepreneurs while the remaining ones decide to be rentiers. We also study the efficiency of equilibria which is shown to increase by replication of the economy, but sometimes to decrease as a consequence of wealth redistribution.We thank an anonymous referee for his insightful comments     

Cap and trade policies in the presence of monopoly and distortionary taxation

We extend an analytical general equilibrium model of environmental policy with pre-existing labor tax distortions to include pre-existing monopoly power as well. We show that the existence of monopoly power has two offsetting effects on welfare. First, the environmental policy reduces monopoly profits, and the negative effect on income increases labor supply in a way that partially offsets the pre-existing labor supply distortion. Second, environmental policy raises prices, so interaction with the pre-existing monopoly distortion further exacerbates the labor supply distortion. This second effect is larger, for reasonable parameter values, so the existence of monopoly reduces the welfare gain (or increases the loss) from environmental restrictions.     

Incentives in decentralized random matching markets

Decentralized markets are modeled by means of a sequential game where, starting from any matching situation, firms are randomly given the opportunity to make job offers. In this random context, we prove the existence of ordinal subgame perfect equilibria where firms act according to a list of preferences. Moreover, every such equilibrium preserves stability for a particular profile of preferences. In particular, when firms best reply by acting truthfully, every equilibrium outcome is stable for the true preferences. Conversely, when the initial matching is the empty matching, every stable matching can be reached as the outcome of an ordinal equilibrium play of the game.     

On the optimality of the full-cost pricing

This article is aimed at defining the full-cost pricing as a leader-follower game in two-tier organizations: (i) the upstream unit fixes the production capacity and uses it as a cost driver to compute the average cost; (ii) the downstream unit operates on the market and chooses the output level on the basis of the average cost. In the Cournot oligopoly case, the full-cost pricing is compared with other pricing rules. There exists a wide range of values of the fixed cost, for which the full-cost pricing dominates any other pricing rules, in terms of gross profit.     

International Trade, Bargaining and Efficiency: The Holdup Problem

In the presence of product market imperfections and holdup, we identify allocative and productive efficiency gains resulting from international trade. Under a bilateral monopoly in a closed economy, inefficiencies arise in both input and output markets. Trade in final goods has a procompetitive effect in the product market. This in turn triggers an increase in output, which raises incentives for the upstream firm to invest and helps reduce the hold-up problem.
JEL classification: F 12; F 13; F 15     

Price normalization under imperfect competition

In general equilibrium models of imperfect competition the equilibria depend on how prices are normalized. This note shows that a price normalization preserves convexity properties if and only if prices are measured in terms of a fixed commodity bundle. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for helpful comments, inspiring a simplification in the proof of the main result, and the argument in the Remark.     

Imperfect competition and the modelling of expectations in macroeconomics

We show that when a model of the macroeconomy is based on imperfect, rather than perfect, competition, this may increase the problem of how to model agents’ expectations. We provide a simple example using an overlapping-generations economy with the potential for unemployment. Under certain assumptions about how consumers migrate between locations between the first and second periods of their lives, this extra issue regarding expectations arises. Imperfect competition may increase agents’ forecasting difficulties because they have to forecast not only future equilibrium prices, but also future out-of-equilibrium prices, and by definition the latter are never actually observed.

Foreign direct investment under oligopoly: Profit shifting or profit capturing?

In this paper a model of taxation of foreign source corporate income is developed when the output market is not perfectly competitive. Profit shifting policies, similar to those in the new trade literature, are also present in the case of foreign direct investment (FDI). There are, however, important differences to the new trade theory since in case of FDI, (i) corporate taxation and double taxation relief are the policy instruments rather than output or revenue taxes, (ii) countries are not symmetric in the sense that the host country has the first right to tax the multinational's profit and the home country reacts by providing double taxation relief, and (iii) output but not corporate taxation is specific to imperfectly competitive industries. It is argued that (a) variants of a tax credit are analogous to export subsidies, (b) when the home country operates a tax credit system the host country's incentive to capture the multinational's profit is bounded under imperfect competition, (c) when the host country offers a tax holiday the home country should imitate this policy, and (d) in the presence of perfect competitive industries, double taxation relief is a good instrument to target imperfectly competitive industries.     

The strategic Marshallian cross

We prove existence and uniqueness of non-autarkic equilibria in bilateral oligopoly assuming only that preferences are binormal and satisfy a weakened version of gross substitutes. We permit complete heterogeneity of preferences and our analysis exploits the fact that payoffs depend only on own strategy and two universal aggregates. This allows us to define strategic versions of supply and demand curves such that non-autarkic Nash equilibria are in 1–1 correspondence with intersections of these curves. The same approach can be used to establish comparative statics under the assumptions above. As examples, we focus on adding players and changing endowments. This competitive approach also allows us to conclude that much of conventional Marshallian analysis is robust to strategic manipulation.     

A new model of equilibrium involuntary unemployment

Summary. We show that equilibrium involuntary unemployment emerges in a multi-stage game model where all market power resides with firms, on both the labour and the output market. Firms decide wages, employment, output and prices, and under constant returns there exists a continuum of subgame perfect Nash equilibria involving unemployment and positive profits. A firm does not undercut the equilibrium wage since then high wage firms would attract its workers, thus forcing the undercutting firm out of both markets. Full employment equilibria are payoff dominated by unemployment equilibria, and the arguments are robust to decreasing returns.Received: 21 May 2001, Revised: 15 April 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: D43, E24.Correspondence to: Leo KaasWe thank an anonymous referee, Woojin Lee, Klaus Ritzberger and seminar participants in Konstanz, Manchester, Milan, Prague, Vienna, and Warwick for helpful comments. Financial support from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) under grant L138251030 and from the Manchester School Visiting Fellowship Scheme is gratefully acknowledged.     

中国信贷市场匹配机制的再设计

我国的银行信贷市场呈现二元结构--目标客户与非目标客户信贷市场.两者有着不同的运行机制.目标客户信贷市场的议价过程存在一个类似企业求婚的递延接受程序,市场的运行结果稳定.非目标客户信贷市场不存在导致稳定结果的分散化匹配程序,市场广度和深度不够.为提高非目标客户信贷市场的稳定性和运行效率,我们建议通过公布银行信贷方案、设立非目标客户信贷中心、设立中央化的匹配清算所等,把分散化的议价过程变成中央化的匹配程序,从而完善和降低中小企业的交易成本,为中小企业的发展拓展广阔空间.     

Market Structure and Fiscal Policy Effectiveness

In a monopolistic competition macromodel with endogenous market structure, the fiscal multiplier is shown to consist of two components. The first depicts the response of output to a fiscal expansion through the conventional channels that disregard the role of market imperfections. The second component captures the effects of firms' market power as well as the policy-induced change in market structure. The latter effect—which has not been taken into account in existing studies—is shown to be quite significant in raising the fiscal multiplier (even above unity) and in improving consumers' welfare when the labour market is competitive.     

(Non)optimality of the Friedman rule and optimal taxation in a growing economy with imperfect competition

This paper shows that if capital generates production externality, there exists a wedge between returns to money and to capital, driving the Friedman rule is not optimal. However, in the absence of capital externality, the Friedman rule may be valid even under imperfect competition.