Market power,price discrimination,and allocative efficiency in intermediate‐goods markets

We consider a monopolistic supplier's optimal choice of two‐part tariff contracts when downstream firms are asymmetric. We find that the optimal discriminatory contracts amplify differences in downstream firms' competitiveness. Firms that are larger—either because they are more efficient or because they sell a superior product—obtain a lower wholesale price than their rivals. This increases allocative efficiency by favoring the more productive firms. In contrast, we show that a ban on price discrimination reduces allocative efficiency and can lead to higher wholesale prices for all firms. As a result, consumer surplus, industry profits, and welfare are lower.     

Resale price maintenance and collusion

The article revisits the conventional wisdom according to which vertical restrictions on retail prices help upstream firms to collude. We analyze the scope for collusion with and without resale price maintenance (RPM) when retailers observe local shocks on demand or retail costs. In the absence of RPM, retail prices react to retailers' information, and deviations from collusive behavior are thus difficult to detect. By eliminating retail price flexibility, RPM facilitates the detection of deviations but reduces profits and thus increases the short‐run gains from a deviation. Overall, RPM can facilitate collusion and reduce total welfare when firms adopt it.     

An empirical investigation of the welfare effects of banning wholesale price discrimination

Economic theory does not provide sharp predictions on the welfare effects of banning wholesale price discrimination: if downstream cost differences exist, then discrimination shifts production inefficiently, toward high‐cost retailers, so a ban increases welfare; if differences in price elasticity of demand across retailers exist, discrimination may increase welfare if quantity sold increases, so a ban reduces welfare. Using retail prices and quantities of coffee brands sold by German retailers, I estimate a model of demand and supply and separate cost and demand differences. Simulating a ban on wholesale price discrimination has positive welfare effects in this market, and less if downstream cost differences shrink, or with less competition.     

Competitive foreclosure

We model oligopolistic firms, producing substitutes, who compete for inputs from capacity constrained suppliers in a decentralized market. Compared to a price‐taking input market, the incentive to foreclose downstream competitors leads to higher input prices and to a higher aggregate amount of input acquired. This novel feature mitigates the output reducing effect of downstream market power and may even restore efficiency in the unique (input) market clearing equilibrium. Other equilibria, where firms coordinate on which suppliers to target, result in excess supply (involuntary unemployment, if input is labor) and even higher input prices. Our insights generalize to alternative vertical structures.     

Competition and Collusion in Dealer Markets

This article develops a game-theoretic model to analyze market makers' intertemporal pricing strategies. We show that dealers who adopt noncooperative pricing strategies may set bid-ask spreads above competitive levels. This form of “implicit collusion” differs from explicit collusion, where dealers cooperate to fix prices. Price discreteness or asymmetric information are not required for collusion to occur. Rather, institutional arrangements that restrict access to the order flow are important determinants of the ability to collude because they reduce dealers' incentives to compete on price. Public policy efforts to increase interdealer competition should focus on such restrictions.     

Information exchange in cartels

Antitrust authorities view the exchange of information among firms regarding costs, prices, or sales as anticompetitive. Such exchanges allow competitors to closely monitor each other, thereby facilitating collusion. But the exchange of aggregate information, perhaps via a third party, is legal. The logic is that collusion is difficult if the identity of a price-cutting firm cannot be ascertained. Here, we examine this logic using Stigler's model of secret price cuts. We first identify circumstances such that when no information exchange is possible, collusion is difficult. We then show that if firms' aggregate sales are made public, nearly perfect collusion is possible.     

Demand spillovers and market outcomes in the mutual fund industry

When consumers concentrate their purchases at a single firm, firms that offer more products than their rivals gain market share for all their products. These spillovers induce firms to offer a greater variety of products rather than lower prices, and a concentrated industry with few large firms can arise if spillovers are strong enough. This article presents a simple model that illustrates this mechanism explicitly. The empirical analysis documents strong demand spillovers in the retail segment of the U.S. mutual fund industry, in which fees are nontrivial, families offer many funds, and the market is quite concentrated. Instead, spillovers are weaker, fees are lower, families offer fewer funds, and the market structure is more fragmented in the institutional segment.     

When is upstream collusion profitable?

Motivated by the recent antitrust cases in which Japanese auto parts suppliers colluded to raise supply prices against their long‐term collaborators, the Japanese carmakers, we study the conditions under which an upstream collusion is profitable even after compensating downstream direct purchasers. Oligopoly competition in successive industries is shown to give rise to a vertical externality and a horizontal externality. If a collusive price of intermediate goods better balances the two externalities, the collusion will raise the joint profit of all firms in the two industries and is therefore profitable for the upstream after compensation of downstream firms.     

Capital structure under collusion

We analyze the financial leverage of firms that collude to soften product market competition by forming a cartel. We find that cartel firms have lower leverage during collusion periods. This is consistent with the idea that cartel firms strategically reduce leverage to make their cartels more stable, because high leverage makes deviations from a cartel agreement more attractive. Given that cartels have a large economic footprint, their study is also relevant for the capital structure literature, which has largely ignored the role of anti-competitive behavior.     

Vertical control of a distribution network—an empirical analysis of magazines

How does an upstream firm determine the size of its distribution network, and what is the role of vertical restraints? To address these questions, we develop two empirical entry models. In the benchmark coordinated entry model, the upstream firm sets market‐specific wholesale prices and implements the first best. In the more realistic restricted/free entry model, the upstream firm only sets a uniform wholesale price. As a second‐best solution, it restricts entry in markets where business stealing (encroachment) is high, and allows free entry elsewhere. We apply the model to magazine distribution, and assess the profitability of alternative vertical restraints. Banning restricted licensing reduces profits only slightly, so the business rationale for restricted licensing should not be sought in the prevention of encroachment. Furthermore, market‐specific wholesale prices implement the first best, but the profit increase would be small, providing a rationale for the commonly observed uniform wholesale prices. Finally, uniform franchise fees are much less effective than a uniform wholesale price to cope with local market differences.     

Why do bank-dependent firms bear interest-rate risk?

I document that floating-rate loans from banks, particularly important for bank-dependent firms, drive most variation in firms’ exposure to interest rates. I argue that banks prefer to supply floating-rate loans, due to their finite ability to transform short-duration deposit liabilities into long duration assets. Three key findings support this argument: banks with more floating-rate liabilities make more floating-rate loans, hold more floating-rate securities, and quote lower prices for floating-rate loans. Intermediary funding structures therefore help determine what types of contracts non-financial firms use. Banks transmit rising policy rates to firms by contractually raising interest rates on existing loans, not just by reducing the supply of new loans.     

Vertical collusion

We characterize collusion involving secret vertical contracts between retailers and their supplier—who are all equally patient (“vertical collusion”). We show such collusion is easier to sustain than collusion among retailers. Furthermore, vertical collusion can solve the supplier's inability to commit to charging the monopoly wholesale price when retailers are differentiated. The supplier pays retailers slotting allowances as a prize for adhering to the collusive scheme and rejects contract deviations. In the presence of competing suppliers, vertical collusion can be sustained using short-term exclusive dealing.     

The value of information and optimal organization

The article addresses the issue of optimal organization of production. I compare three organizational forms: centralization (one agent produces different inputs), decentralization (each of two agents produces a different input and contracts directly with the principal), and delegation (two agents produce different inputs, the principal contracts with one of them only). The optimal organizational form depends on the degree of complementarity/substitutability between the inputs in the final use. The degree of complementarity/substitutability also determines whether delegation is payoff equivalent to the two‐agent mechanism from the point of view of the principal. In the context of delegation, I consider which of the two agents should serve as the primary contractor. I also address the issue of collusion between the agents in a decentralized organization and characterize the conditions under which a stake of collusion exists.     

COMPETITION AND REGULATION IN THE U.K. ELECTRICITY INDUSTRY (WITH A BRIEF LOOK AT CALIFORNIA)

In this article, the U.K.'s Director General of Electricity Supply from 1989 to 1998 assesses the effects of deregulation and competition on the U.K. electricity industry after about a decade. Expansion of existing competitors, new entry, and further restructuring have reduced the aggregate share of the largest two generation companies from nearly 80% to 26%. Efficiency has improved and wholesale prices have fallen after an initial increase. Voluntary bilateral contracts markets are about to replace the mandatory "Pool," with centralised control limited to physically balancing the system and settling contract imbalances. Retail supply competition has been active for large industrial customers since the beginning, and 80% of them now buy from another supplier. The market for residential customers opened in early 1999, and already nearly a quarter of them have chosen another supplier. Incentive price controls on transmission and distribution have stimulated increased efficiency and significantly reduced use-of-system charges. Overall, prices for all classes of customers have fallen by 25–35% in real terms since privatisation, and quality of service has improved.
California has adopted a policy that is similar in many respects, but with very different results. The problems there have stemmed partly from less favourable demand and supply conditions, but also from significant policy differences, including barriers to building new capacity, obstacles to the use of long-term supply (or hedging) contracts, retail price controls at untenable levels, and the requirement that (after a transition period) utilities pass through wholesale spot prices directly to their customers. Changes in such policies will eventually enable both producers and consumers in California to benefit from competition.     

Passive vertical integration and strategic delegation

With backward acquisitions in their efficient supplier, downstream firms profitably internalize the effects of their actions on their rivals' sales, while upstream competition is also relaxed. Downstream prices increase with passive, yet decrease with controlling acquisition. Passive acquisition is profitable when controlling acquisition is not. Downstream acquirers strategically abstain from vertical control, thus delegating commitment to the supplier, and with it high input prices, allowing them to charge high downstream prices. The effects of passive backward acquisition are reinforced with the acquisition by several downstream firms in the efficient supplier. The results are sustained when suppliers charge two‐part tariffs.     

Transfer pricing in vertically integrated industries

Tax officials judge whether a multinational’s transfer price is consistent with the arm’s-length standard, the price at which two independent firms would carry out a similar transaction, by using data from comparable but independent transactions. In vertically integrated industries, the only source of comparable data may be from controlled (nonindependent) transactions. Conventional wisdom asserts that standard arm’s-length methods cannot perform well in such markets because the comparability rules encourage the integrated firms to collude tacitly on transfer prices in a way that amplifies tax-differential incentives. In this paper, we show that strategic linkages between vertically integrated firms operating in the same final good market moderate, and can possibly reverse, tax-differential incentives if the correct comparison method is used. The Cost-Plus method turns out to be the most effective in limiting the equilibrium amount of profit-shifting out of the high-tax country and it yields the highest tax revenues for the high-tax country. These benefits are shown to strengthen when the firms have private cost information.      

Partial cross ownership and tacit collusion

We examine the effects that passive investments in rival firms have on the incentives of firms to engage in tacit collusion. In general, these incentives depend in a complex way on the entire partial cross ownership (PCO) structure in the industry. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for PCO arrangements to facilitate tacit collusion and also examine how tacit collusion is affected when firms' controllers make direct passive investments in rival firms.     

Sustaining implicit contracts when agents have career concerns: the role of information disclosure

Firms often augment career concerns incentives with implicit incentive contracts. I formalize the interaction between these two incentives, and highlight its implications on a firm's decision to disclose its workers' productivity information. Disclosure enhances career concerns but inhibits implicit contracts. I show two main results. First, implicit contracts weaken (i.e., substitute) career concerns if the prior belief about the worker's ability is low, and vice versa. Second, when these incentives are substitutes, the optimal disclosure policy follows a cutoff rule: patient firms are opaque, and transparent firms never offer implicit contracts. These results need not hold if the incentives are complements.     

Dynamic competition in deceptive markets

In many deceptive markets, firms design contracts to exploit mistakes of naive consumers. These contracts also attract less-profitable sophisticated consumers. I study such markets when firms compete repeatedly. By observing their customers' usage patterns, firms acquire private information about their level of naiveté. First, I find that private information on naiveté mitigates competition and is of great value even with homogeneous products. Second, competition between initially symmetrically informed firms is mitigated when firms can educate naifs about mistakes. In an analogous setting without naifs, the second result does not occur; the first result occurs when firms cannot disclose fees.     

Disclosure standards for vertical contracts

In this article, we investigate the welfare consequences of disclosure of vertical contracts. When much of retail competition is among products provided by a dominant supplier, disclosure provides a means through which the supplier can use its prices to coordinate the retail behavior of its wholesale customers. From the retail consumers' perspective, such coordination is unwanted, leading them to favor opacity of contracts. When retail competition is across brands made by different suppliers, disclosure becomes a conduit through which suppliers compete indirectly via their retail surrogates. Consumers welcome the increased competition accompanying such disclosures. In short, the efficacy of disclosure standards depends critically on the suppliers’ market reach and the relative intensity of intrabrand versus interbrand retail competition.