产品差别化、价格战与合谋

随着中国市场化改革的不断深入,价格战成为各行各业企业间不断上演的舞台剧。文章旨在从产品差别化与企业间合谋的相互关系出发,来分析企业频繁选择价格竞争而难以进行合谋的原因,即产品垂直差别水平的降低将使合谋难以维持,价格战容易爆发。因此,解决价格战的途径之一是中国企业应该加大自主创新的能力,提高产品垂直差别化程度。     

Gains From Price Rigidity

This paper shows that there are substantial gains from price rigidity in an imperfectly competitive economy. Firms can increase their profits by agreeing some markets as markets of long-term contracts, of which prices are determined in advance to other spot market prices. Although they determine prices non-cooperatively in both markets, the mutual commitment making some markets' prices predetermined induces a price–price spiral between firms, which results in substantial gains for both firms. These gains outweigh the cost of inflexibility arising from price rigidity even though demand fluctuation is large and marginal cost is increasing.
JEL Classification Numbers: E30, E32.     

Dynamic Model for Market Competition and Price Rigidity

This article presents a price floor model in which durability, unit costs and production period are factors in explaining price rigidity. This article elaborates that cost structure plays an essential role in resolving the inconclusive relationship between market concentration and price rigidity. When the industry is characterized by decreasing returns of scale, the degree of price flexibility decreases as market competition intensifies. The reverse is true when the industry exhibits increasing returns of scale. The factors that cause price rigidity also foster price adjustment asymmetry and price adjustment lag. During times of recession, the model exhibits upward price flexibility as costs increase, but downward price rigidity as costs decrease. Even under forward-looking expectations, the way in which firms adjust prices could look as though they have adaptive expectations. If price stickiness is a characteristic of market competition, then public policies determined by price level could be too drastic for firms in competitive markets.     

同谘合谋还是同舟共济:非控股股东网络权力与股价崩盘风险

非控股股东可以抑制控股股东和管理层隐藏坏消息的行为,也可以通过合谋而形成利益输送渠道,因此非控股股东对于维护资本市场的秩序至关重要.从股价崩盘的研究视角,考察了非控股股东网络权力对崩盘风险的影响.研究发现:非控股股东网络权力越大,越能降低企业的股价崩盘风险.进一步的机制分析发现:非控股股东网络权力是通过嵌入效应和治理效应抑制股价崩盘风险的;前者通过网络信息关系和结构嵌入效应抑制股价崩盘风险,后者通过对控股股东掏空和管理层捂盘行为的治理而降低股价崩盘风险.     

Interlinking and Collusion

In this paper, we suggest a new rationale for the existence of interlinked contracts in the agrarian economies of developing countries. Using the framework of an infinitely repeated game with discounting, we show that interlinked contracts can help the dominant parties to collude, in cases where collusion is not possible with noninterlinked contracts. This occurs because either interlinkage pools incentive constraints across markets, or it affects the incentives of agents to accept deviating contracts. We illustrate these mechanisms by considering the case of interlinkage between markets for credit and share tenancy. The model that is used to formalize the second mechanism is characterized by frictions in the tenancy market, which we model using the standard framework of search and matching.     

Labour Hoarding, Price Rigidity and the Theory of Imperfect Competition under Uncertain Demand

It is shown that a monopolistic firm under uncertainty may be inclined to keep some of its output unsold when demand is low. This gives rise to changes in conventional results. Under uncertainty, a risk-neutral monopolistic firm produces more than in a deterministic environment and it refuses to sell its total output when demand is low, because the marginal revenue could become negative or lower than the cost of selling the product. Moreover, in this framework, prices are shown to be more rigid downwards than upwards. The model also provides a new explanation for labour hoarding.
JEL classification : D 24; D 42     

Collusion and Information Exchange

Antitrust authorities view that exchange of individual firms’ sales data is more anti‐competitive than that of aggregate sales data. In this paper, I survey antitrust implications of such inter‐firm information exchange. I argue that both types of information exchange are anti‐competitive under some circumstances. More precisely, I compare profits when each type of information exchange is allowed to that when firms can only observe their own sales (Stigler’s secret price‐cutting model), and the former is bigger than the latter. I also provide a general method to bound the equilibrium profits without such information exchange.     

Collusion and biased tournaments

Tournaments are vulnerable to collusion. This paper finds that biased tournaments can be more effective at preventing collusion than unbiased ones. When agents can collude to exert low effort, introducing some bias into tournaments generates opposite effects on favored and disfavored agents׳ respective incentives to exert high effort and provides strong incentives for the favored agent to deviate from collusion. Introducing an adequate degree of bias reduces the principal׳s incentive cost for preventing collusion; however, granting excessive bias instead increases the incentive cost. We show that the optimal level of bias can be endogenously determined.     

Collusion and discrimination in organizations

In a principal-multi-agent setting we investigate how optimal contracts should be modified under relative performance evaluation when agents collude. Agents may write side-contracts, which are not contingent on their effort choices but indirectly control them through side-transfers. We show that the optimal collusion-proof contract is to introduce a “discriminatory policy” in the sense that the wage schemes offered to agents depend on their identities even if they are identical with respect to productive abilities. Such discriminatory wage schemes explain the organizational strategy of “divide and conquer” as an optimal response to collusion.     

Collusion in homogeneous and heterogeneous tournaments

In tournaments, only the relative performance of agents is important. Therefore, the agents have an incentive to collude by jointly deviating to low effort levels. Previous papers on collusion have proposed to make the tournament asymmetric to prevent agents from colluding. However, by allowing side payments between the agents and focusing on implicit enforcement of collusion, the current study demonstrates that this is not true. Often, the principal prefers to hire homogeneous agents to make collusions less stable.     

Product Market Integration and Union Collusion

This paper investigates the effects of product market integration on the incentives and scope for union collusion across borders. In the absence of binding agreements, the impact of this process on the unions’ willingness to collude depends both on the degree of product market integration and on the degree of substitutability among traded goods. Where trade barriers across countries are relatively low, implicit cross‐border collusion among unions is more difficult the more integrated are product markets and the less substitutable are traded goods.     

Merger,Partial Collusion and Relocation

We set up a three-firm model of spatial competition to analyse how a merger affects the incentives for relocation, and conversely, how the possibility of relocation affects the profitability of the merger, particularly for the non-participating firm. We also consider the cases of partial collusion in either prices or locations. Under the assumption of mill pricing, we find that a merger will generally induce the merger participants to relocate, but the direction of relocation is ambiguous, and dependent on the degree of convexity in the consumers transportation cost function. Furthermore, we identify a set of parameter values for which the free-rider effect of a merger vanishes, implying that the possibility of relocation could solve the merger paradox.Acknowledgement We thank Jonathan Cave, Frode Meland, participants at the Royal Economic Society Conference 2003 and an anonymous referee for valuable comments.     

环境监管中的博弈分析

通过建立环境监管问题的完全信息动态博弈模型,文章证明了在适宜的制度环境条件下,合谋可能是企业与地方政府的最优选择。针对优化制度环境,文章提出要加大来自上级政府的监督与制裁力度,改革地方政府的绩效考评制度等政策建议,以期改善地方环境状况。     

Exchange Agreements Facilitate Collusion

A duopoly model with quantity competition is analyzed in which firms collude in two markets. There is specialization in production in order to promote efficiency. Firms may then either exclusively market one good each, or they may agree to exchange goods and cross-supply a part of the production to the other firm. It is shown that, compared to specialization in marketing, positive exchanges of goods relax the incentive constraints that limit the extent of collusion.     

Undominated Nash Implementation with Collusion and Renegotiation

This article looks at implementation in economic environments when agents have perfect information about the state of the world, but cannot commit not to renegotiate bad outcomes or to collude against each other. If renegotiation satisfies a weak condition of disagreement point monotonicity, then any Pareto-efficient social choice function can be implemented if there are at least three agents who play undominated Nash equilibria. The mechanism does not use modulo or integer games, has no bad mixed strategy equilibria, and is “bounded.”Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: D71.     

Collusion and the organization of delegated expertise

We study the optimal design of incentive contracts for experts in different collusion environments, and explore implications for the organization of delegated expertise. We consider a principal relying on experts to gather and report two signals about a project's value. The principal can have a single expert gather both signals or two experts gather one signal each. We show that absent collusion, the multiexpert organization dominates the single expert organization. However, this ranking is reversed when the experts can collude among themselves (horizontal collusion) and with the principal (vertical collusion).     

Reciprocal Supervision,Collusion and Organizational Design

We study the design of supervisory functions in an organization with one principal and two agents. Each agent can perform supervision activities regarding the other agent. We characterize the way the principal must structure incentive payments to avoid any collusive activity between agents. In particular, it is shown that better mutual information between agents may hurt the principal. The other main result is the possibility that it may be better to give up one supervisory function or to have a third party be the supervisor if possible. Finally, we show that such a dual supervisory structure raises the possibility that letting collusion happen may be the best policy.