Public Good Provision Under Monopolistic Competition

This paper presents a model of voluntary private provision of public good under monopolistic competition following Pecorino. Consumers prefer product varieties and a public good. Marginal utility of income depends inversely upon the aggregate consumption of private goods in this model. As population size increases, aggregate consumption of private goods goes up and marginal utility of income falls. This explains the positive relationship between population size and public good provision. Any technological changes in the production of private goods are shown to be neutral to the aggregate provision of public good. These results are in contrast to Pecorino.     

On Monopolistic Licensing Strategies under Asymmetric Information

Consider a research lab that owns a patent on a new technology but cannot develop a marketable final product based on the new technology. There are two downstream firms that might successfully develop the new product. If the downstream firms' benefits from being the sole supplier of the new product are private information, the research lab will sometimes sell two licenses, even though under complete information it would have sold one exclusive license. This is in contrast to the standard result that a monopolist will sometimes serve fewer, but never more buyers when there is private information. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: L12, D45, D82     

Monopolistic Screening with Boundedly Rational Consumers*

In this paper, I revisit the monopolistic screening problem with two types assuming that consumers are boundedly rational. Bounded rationality implies that the revelation principle does not apply and the choice of the selling mechanism entails a loss of generality. I show that if the monopolist restricts attention to the mechanisms that offer menus of two choices, the profits are lower than in the case of fully rational consumers by the term of order ln λ/λ, where λ is the degree of rationality of the consumers. The monopolist, however, can approximate the profits earned when consumers are fully rational by using a more elaborate message game.     

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.     

上市公司会计信息披露质量提升问题研究

本文以证券市场为背景探讨了在证券市场上公开发行股票的上市公司信息披露质量的问题。狭义的会计信息披露质量是指所披露的会计信息质量,而广义的会计信息披露质量不仅包括信息的质量还包括会计信息的披露过程质量和会计信息的生成过程质量。本文以披露质量的广义概念为切入点,以证券市场为背景对目前上市公司在会计信息披露方面存在的重大问题进行了深入分析,并提出设立信息披露质量分析框架的设想,具有较强的现实意义。     

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.     

Ecological Dumping under Monopolistic Competition

The competitive choice of emission taxes by two governments is analysed in a model of monopolostic competition with capital mobility where pollution externalities are regional. Assuming that governments have no other policy instrument apart from emission taxes at their disposal, I show that governments choose inefficiently low (high) taxes if the importance of emissions in production is small (large) relative to transport costs and the mark-up. In contrast to the previous literature, the marginal disutility of pollution is not among the parameters which separate the non-cooperative choice of emission taxes from the social planner's choice.
JEL classification : F 1; H 7; Q 2     

Monopolistic screening and uninformed buyers

In the standard monopolistic screening problem, buyers obtain information rent as a result of possessing private information; if a contract can be offered before the buyer knows his valuation, the seller can extract the full (expected) surplus. I consider a situation where the buyer may or may not have private information about his valuation at the time the contract is offered. Is the seller (strictly) better off as compared to the standard situation? The answer depends crucially on the specific model. In the 2-types model, unless the probability (that the buyer is uninformed) reaches a critical threshold, the seller is unable to benefit from the buyer's ignorance. In the continuum-types model, on the other hand, optimal expected profit is strictly higher than in the standard model whenever this probability is positive.     

自然垄断理论的批判与创新--李怀新作《自然垄断理论研究》

长期以来,依据现有的自然垄断理论及其政策运营的各国自然垄断产业,普遍存在着质次价高和严重亏损的问题,消费者不仅没能享受到自然垄断本应带来的规模经济、范围经济和成本劣加性的好处,反而身受质次价高等垄断弊端之苦;而政府不仅增加了大量的管制成本,还不得不承担巨额的企业亏损.自20世纪70年代以来,自然垄断产业的改革浪潮已从西方发达国家逐渐涌向全世界,自然垄断领域里的传统观念已被打破,一些自然垄断产业放松管制,引入竞争,在一定程度上改变了以往自然垄断产业质次价高和严重亏损的局面.     

Monopolistic wages or efficient contracts?

Using a representative sample of medium and large firms, this paper explores the process of employment and wage bill determination in the Bulgarian manufacturing sector. The results suggest that, during 1997–2001, the labour market behaviour of these firms was consistent with weakly efficient contracting and employment elasticity with respect to both sales and wages similar to that of the fastest‐reforming Central and Eastern Europe economies. Although a case study using data on sell‐off deals by the Privatization Agency suggests that the largest firms selected for cash privatization may have exhibited higher preference for wage enhancement than employment protection, the results do not bring into question the efficient performance of the post‐crisis labour market in Bulgaria. Importantly, the study rejects the hypothesis that either persistent government stakes or mass privatization may have led to efficiency deterioration.     

Monopolistic security design in finance economies

Summary. The purpose of this paper is to analyze endogenous asset innovation by an entrepreneurial exchange owner in a general equilibrium model of incomplete security markets with financial transaction fees. A monopolistic market maker has the technology to introduce a new option into the economy and charge investors proportional transaction fees if they trade on the exchange. The market maker's objective is to choose the security and transaction fee that maximize revenues when opening the exchange. A computational analysis of this problem is necessary since there are no interesting models with closed-form solutions. We compute the price and welfare effects of the option introduction. Received: March 14, 2000; revised version: December 12, 2000     

International Commodity Taxation under Monopolistic Competition

We analyze non‐cooperative commodity taxation in a two‐country trade model characterized by monopolistic competition and international firm and capital mobility. In this setting, taxes in one country affect foreign welfare through the relocation of mobile firms and through changes in the rents accruing to capital owners. With consumption‐based taxation, these fiscal externalities exactly offset each other and the non‐cooperative tax equilibrium is Pareto efficient. With production‐based taxation, however, there are additional externalities on the foreign tax base and the foreign price level that lead non‐cooperative tax rates to exceed their Pareto efficient levels.     

Public Good Mix in a Federation with Incomplete Information

We analyze a model of resource allocation in a federal system in which the center transfers real resources between member states. The center is assumed to be unable to observe the precise value of the cost differences across jurisdictions that motivate the transfers. Moreover, the center cannot observe the output levels of the individual local public goods provided by the jurisdictions, but must condition its transfers on a coarse aggregate of expenditures on public goods. We find that when the jurisdiction with private information realizes a high unit cost, it is generally worthwhile for the center to allow it a level of expenditure on public goods that differs from the "first best" level. However, whether that level is higher or lower than its first best level depends on the magnitudes of demand parameters for the local public good.     

Speculative Attacks with Multiple Sources of Public Information*

We propose a speculative attack model in which agents receive multiple public signals. Diverse pieces of public information can be taken into account differently by different players and are likely to lead to different appreciations ex post. This process defines players' expected private values of a successful attack. The main result shows that equilibrium uniqueness depends on two conditions: (i) signals are sufficiently dispersed and (ii) private beliefs about signals' relative precision differ sufficiently. We derive some implications for information dissemination policy. Transparency in this context is multidimensional: it concerns the publicity of announcements, the number of signals disclosed and their precision.     

Noncooperative Equilibrium and Chamberlinian Monopolistic Competition

This paper addresses the existence of equilibrium for a nonatomic Bertrand game in a Chamberlinian environment. We reformulate O. Hart′s model (Rev. Econ. Stud. 52, 1985, 529–546) as a nonatomic game and show that under dispersion of tastes and continuity of the tastes density, there exists a pure-strategies ε-equilibrium where prices exceed marginal cost. Unlike Hart′s model there is no need to impose uniformity (or even independence) on the distribution of the m-tuple of differential commodities that consumers care about. Moreover, demand curves are allowed to vary across firms and in equilibrium firms may earn profits. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: B21, D43, L13.