Prices versus quantities: environmental regulation and imperfect competition

By exercising market power, a firm will distort the production, and therefore the emissions decisions, of all firms in the market. This paper examines how the welfare implications of strategic behavior depend on how pollution is regulated. Under an emissions tax, aggregate emissions do not affect the marginal cost of polluting. In contrast, the price of tradable permits is endogenous. I show when this feedback effect increases strategic firms’ output. Relative to a tax, tradable permits may improve welfare in a market with imperfect competition. As an application, I model strategic and competitive behavior of wholesalers in a Mid-Atlantic electricity market. Simulations suggest that exercising market power decreased emissions locally, thereby substantially reducing the regional tradable permit price. Furthermore, I find that had regulators opted to use a tax instead of permits, the deadweight loss from imperfect competition would have been even greater.     

团队跨边界行为与新产品开发绩效：设计创新能力的中介效应

设计驱动创新逐渐成为企业竞争中除市场创新和技术创新之外的第三种致胜方式，设计创新能力较强企业往往在市场上占据独特优势地位。基于团队学习理论，构建一个“行为-能力-绩效”双调节模型，探讨团队跨边界行为对于新产品开发绩效的作用机制和边界条件。结果表明：①团队跨边界行为对新产品开发绩效具有正向影响；②设计创新能力在跨边界行为对新产品开发绩效间起中介作用；③团队知识共享在跨边界行为和设计创新能力间起调节作用，团队知识共享越强，跨边界行为对创新设计能力的正向影响越大；④团队监督在设计创新能力与新产品开发绩效间起到调节作用，团队监督越强，设计创新能力对新产品开发绩效的正向影响越大。     

Sraffa,Okun, and the theory of the imperfectly competitive firm

Piero Sraffa's Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is wedded to Arthur Okun's Prices and Quantities to bring out important implications for the theory of the imperfectly competitive firm. The implications relate to firm objectives and to firm behavior in both the ‘vertical’ environment (relations with suppliers) and the ‘horizontal’ environment (relations with customers and competitors).     

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.     

The Onset and Persistence of Secular Stagnation in the U.S. Economy: 1910-1990

Human relations involve a balance of substitution and complementarity. In economics, substitution is stressed and complementarity ignored. An economics of substitution will lead to competitive fragmentation. An economics of complementarity supports a case for cooperation and organizational health. If complementarity outweighs substitution, what are the implications? A shift to common needs enters new realms of social design. If wellbeing is social — if our benefits are aligned — the lack of conflict invites community. Here, competitive values cause strife and harm. In this paper, I depict the culture of complementarity in economics. I offer a key to achieving community, replacing substitution with complementarity in our basic assumptions. To move beyond a myopic culture resulting from competition, we need an economics of complementarity.     

竞争战略、企业边界与竞争优势——基于资源基础论的分析

基于资源基础论,从竞争战略对企业边界的影响和企业边界对企业竞争优势的影响两个维度,对企业边界的相关研究文献进行了梳理。探讨了竞争战略、企业边界与竞争优势之间的互动机理,揭示了目前关于企业边界理论的研究现状及今后的研究方向。     

Liquidity risk and financial competition: Implications for asset prices and monetary policy

This paper studies the implications of banking competition for capital markets and monetary policy. In particular, I develop a two-sector monetary growth model in which a group of agents is exposed to liquidity shocks and money is essential. Banks insure depositors against such risk and invest in the economy's assets. In this setting, I compare an economy with a perfectly competitive banking sector to an economy with a fully concentrated financial sector. Unlike previous work, banks can have market power in both deposits and capital markets. Compared to a perfectly competitive financial sector, I demonstrate that a monopolistic banking system can have substantial adverse consequences on capital formation, assets prices, and the degree of risk sharing. Furthermore, multiple steady-states can emerge and the economy becomes subject to poverty traps. More importantly, market power in financial markets may overturn the Tobin effect present under a perfectly competitive financial sector. This necessarily happens in economies with high degrees of liquidity risk and low levels of capital formation.     

International Trade and the Environment: Theoretical and Policy Linkages

I review and extend three approaches to trade and environmental policies: competitive general equilibrium, oligopoly and monopolistic competition. The first two have surprisingly similar implications: deviations from first-best rules are justified only by constraints on policy choice (which motivates what I call a “single dividend” approach to environmental policy), and taxes and emissions standards differ in ways which reflect the Le Chatelier principle. I also show how environmental taxes may lead to a catastrophic relocation of industry in the presence of agglomeration effects, although not necessarily if there is a continuum of industries which differ in pollution intensity. *An earlier version was presented as an invited plenary lecture to the European Association for Environmental and Resource Economics Conference, Oslo, 1999.     

Deregulation, competition and consumer welfare in a banking market: evidence from Hong Kong

This paper examines competition among commercial banks following deregulation in a small open economy. I jointly estimate a system of differentiated product demand and pricing equations, and use conduct parameters to identify market structure. Overall, I find positive outcomes for the banking deregulation, which suggest that the benefits of deregulation understood in large industrialized economies indeed apply to a small open economy. Encouragingly, the industry becomes more competitive and the consumers are better-off after the deregulation. Empirical results also indicate that the banking sector is characterized by non-cooperative competitive behavior. Bank size is an important determinant of consumer’s bank choice.     

A model of the behavior of farmers and its application to agricultural policies

In this paper, we examine the practical implications for agricultural policies of a model of farmers' behavior. Part I describes the main features of the model and illustrates by empirical evidence the reasons why it seems to be relevant in explaining actual behaviors.     

企业理论之新解释:一个基于知识管理的模型

企业理论研究往往关注三个基本问题:"企业为什么存在、企业和市场的边界是什么";"为什么企业会有所不同,是什么原因导致了这种不同";以及这些理论如何被应用于企业以获得持久的竞争优势.本文力图在这三个方面作出理论探索:一是从知识管理的角度回答企业理论的几个基本问题;二是建立一个基于知识传输的模型,并基于这个模型提出了四个可以检验的命题;三是讨论该模型对战略管理实践的启示.     

Liquidity shocks: A new solution to the forward premium puzzle

The frequent empirical failure of uncovered interest rate parity raises a question that has not been definitively answered: why do predictable excess returns on currencies persist in competitive currency markets? Supported by data from nine major currencies for 1978:08–2019:09, I provide a novel resolution to this enduring forward premium puzzle by building on the financial economics literature that explores the economic implications of limited access to capital markets. A liquidity shock, or the urgent demand for liquidity by credit-constrained arbitragers liquidating bond holdings, causes losses from sudden drops in bond prices. Arbitragers require a liquidity premium to compensate for potential losses that vary directly with the interest rate. It is this liquidity premium that explains persistent excess returns on currencies. I argue for policies favoring a low interest rate environment and macroprudential controls that ease liquidity constraints to increase the efficiency of international capital markets by reducing the liquidity premium.     

ESTIMATING CAUSAL EFFECTS OF ALCOHOL ACCESS AND USE ON A BROAD SET OF RISKY BEHAVIORS: REGRESSION DISCONTINUITY EVIDENCE

A growing body of evidence suggests large increases in criminal behavior and mortality coinciding with a young adult's 21st birthday, when alcohol consumption becomes legal. The policy implications from these findings have focused on the need to reduce drinking among young people, potentially by enforcing stricter alcohol controls. However, mortality and arrests are relatively infrequent outcomes and relatively less is known about the intermediate and more prevalent consequences of legal access to alcohol at age 21. This paper uses the Add Health data combined with a regression discontinuity approach to examine the effects of alcohol access on sexual behavior, drunk driving, violence, and other outcomes. The results suggest relatively large effects that appear concentrated in men. The sample also allows some suggestive policy implications on whether changing the minimum drinking age may reduce these consequences. (JEL I12, I18)     

The role of vaccine effectiveness on individual vaccination decisions and welfare

This paper examines a theoretical model designed to characterize a static, individual vaccination decision environment. I identify and characterize both equilibrium and socially optimal vaccination behavior and determine how this behavior changes as the effectiveness of the vaccine changes. I also evaluate the individual and social welfare implications of a change in vaccine effectiveness. I find that under certain conditions, an increase in vaccine effectiveness can decrease the number of agents vaccinating in equilibrium due to the positive external effects of vaccination. Notably, it is also possible for individual and total welfare to decrease. This is an undesirable, and perhaps unexpected, consequence of better vaccines. Fortunately, welfare at the social optimum always increases as vaccine effectiveness increases. However, equilibrium behavior often falls short of the social optimum due to the positive externalities created by vaccinating.     

Saving behavior in stationary equilibrium with random discounting

Summary. We study the implications of random discount rates of future generations for saving behavior and capital holdings in a steady state competitive equilibrium with heterogeneous population. A well-known difficulty in deterministic economies with heterogeneous households is that in steady state only the most patient households hold capital. In this paper we state conditions under which this random discounting is sufficient for households other than the most patient ones to save. We thus provide a simple and natural way of overcoming the aforementioned difficulty. Received: December 28, 1998; revised version: May 19, 1999     

Consistent firm choice and the theory of supply

Summary. This paper analyzes the problem of deriving predictions, regarding supply behavior of a competitive firm, from prior consistency postulates about input-output choices made by such a firm. It extends the literature by introducing a consistency postulate for firm choice, which is weaker than profit-maximization. This consistency postulate is nevertheless both necessary and sufficient for supply responses predicted by the standard theory of firm choice based on the postulate of profit-maximization. Furthermore, our rationality postulate, in conjunction with another condition, is shown to be equivalent to firm choice behavior that can be rationalized in terms of profit maximization.Received: 11 April 2003, Revised: 26 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: D21.Indraneel Dasgupta: I thank Bhaskar Dutta and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier versions.     

Dissertation Abstract: Decision-Theoretic Models of Market Equilibration

There has been a surprising dearth of decision-theoretic approaches to market equilibration within the extended Arrow-Debreu-McKenzie framework. While game theory is replete with learning and evolutionary models in which Nash equilibria are not necessarily the only stable states of a game, general equilibrium theorists have generally been content to accept the attainment of competitive equilibrium as a matter of faith. The first two chapters of this dissertation advance the study of behaviorally plausible models of market equilibration. First, we develop the epsilon-intelligent competitive equilibrium algorithm. According to this model, the actions of minimally sophisticated agents based on local information will lead an exchange economy to approximate competitive equilibrium in a larger set of economics than Walras’ tatonnement. The algorithm also supports a behavioral interpretation of Negishi’s existence proof of competitive equilibrium. The second chapter is an empirical analysis of laboratory markets designed to test the extent to which human behavior is consistent with the algorithm’s behavioral restrictions, and suggest alternative hypotheses. The chief finding is that while subjects sufficiently sophisticated to consistently secure competitive utility for themselves exist, the majority are satisficers who follow small modifications of a simple utility-improvement rule.While general equilibrium theory has lacked a behaviorally plausible foundation of price equilibration, behavioral economic models typically ignore general equilibrium implications. In the third chapter of this dissertation, I present the surprising result that loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity for gains imply a greater redistribution of endowments than when otherwise identical preferences are reference-independent. The result is surprising because loss aversion was developed in part to account for the status quo bias, whereby people tend to value a good more when it is in their possession than when it is not. One might reasonably suspect trade to be inhibited by this bias. The counter-intuitive result is driven by the fact that, given the axiomatization of loss aversion and diminishing sensitivity for gains, the acquisition of some quantity of a good increases one’s taste for that good, thus perpetuating a taste for more trade.     

Analysis of the Lotka-Volterra competition equations as a technological substitution model

This paper provides insight into the dynamics of the Lotka-Volterra competition (LVC) equations, a much used competition model, and compares the dynamics of LVC competitive substitution to that of several well-known substitution models. The behavior of the LVC equations is analyzed for the special case of a dominant competitor at equilibrium being replaced after the introduction of a small population of an invading competitor with a competitive advantage. Expressions are derived that describe the growth of the invading competitor and that growth is shown to be of four classes: left asymmetric, logistic, right asymmetric with 1−ε₂ asymptote and right asymmetric with γ asymptote. It is shown that the LVC model reverts to logistic substitution in a market of fixed size, a result with important implications. The LVC equations are fitted to the Gompertz, Bass, Non-Symmetrical Responding Logistic (NSRL) and Sharif-Kabir substitution models and compared using a novel graphical technique. The LVC equations can reasonably mimic the full range of curve shapes exhibited by each of these models.     

家庭支持型主管行为对女性知识型员工情感承诺的影响机制研究

本文依据社会交换理论与边界理论,基于263位女性知识型员工的问卷调查资料,采用层次分析、Bootstrap法等方法,探讨了工作家庭平衡在家庭支持型主管行为(FSSB)与情感承诺间的传导机制,分析了边界弹性意愿的调节作用。实证结果表明：FSSB对女性知识型员工的情感承诺有显著的正向影响;工作家庭促进在FSSB影响女性知识型员工情感承诺的过程中起中介作用;女性知识型员工边界弹性意愿正向调节了FSSB通过工作家庭促进影响情感承诺的中介作用。本文的研究结论能为企业留住女性知识型员工并有效地发挥其作用提供有益启示。     

组织领域跨界行为研究热点与前沿

当前,跨界行为理论研究滞后于实践,且呈现出碎片化特征。基于此,在厘清跨界行为内涵的基础上,使用知识图谱法对中国和国际跨界行为研究文献进行计量分析,得出如下结论：①当前,国际跨界行为研究热点是探讨跨界行为的前因及结果变量、信息技术在跨界中的应用,中国主要研究了跨界搜寻与组织绩效、创新的关系;②国际跨界行为的研究前沿是探讨跨界行为与社会资本的关系、制度逻辑在跨界中的应用以及跨界角色等。在此基础上,对跨界行为的前因变量、结果变量及权变因素进行梳理,构建国际跨界行为研究整合性框架,提出推动跨界行为研究建议。