Standards Migration and Peripheral Competition

The impact of competition from peripheral firms on the standards migration efforts by integrated systems firms with de facto standards control is investigated. When systems firms try to migrate their customers to a new standard, they can lose some control over their installed base because they are constrained in their product offerings. Peripherals firms do not face such constraints. Their product offerings allow the emergence of hybrid systems which systems firms are unwilling to match. Improved peripherals from independent firms make these hybrid systems possible. Such hybrid systems lengthen the economic life of the products that make up the existing standard. Historical and empirical evidence from the mainframe computer industry in the 1960s and 1970s illustrates the competition from peripheral firms and their impact on IBM's standards migration efforts. IBM pursued the establishment of a new de facto standard, while independent disk drive manufacturers supplied peripherals that enabled hybrid systems. For the computer mainframe industry, it was shown that those hybrid systems increased the economic life of IBM's older computers, although IBM was able to migrate its customers to the new standard in this case.     

Efficient Migration and Income Tax Competition

This paper examines the consequence of the brain drain for the income tax systems of the source and destination countries for the migration, if the two countries' policies are set noncooperatively by self–interested voters. It is assumed that the brain drain does increase the value of world output: workers with the highest income–earning ability are assumed to be more productive in one country than in another. There are costs to migration of these high–ability workers, costs that are less than the gain in the value of their production. However, for lower–ability workers, the gains in production in moving from the low–productivity country to the high–productivity country are assumed to be less than the migration costs. Voters in the high–productivity country want to capture rents from migrants. These voters are aware of the influence their tax policy has on people's migration decisions. Voters in the low–productivity country also behave strategically. I solve for the Nash equilibrium income tax rates. Increased mobility of highly skilled workers cannot decrease, and may increase, progressivity in the income tax system of the destination country, if migration actually occurs. Finally, the effects of transfers between countries on their income tax systems are examined. Redistribution between countries tends to lead to less redistribution within countries. If transfers between countries are set by a vote of all residents of both countries, then the transfer chosen will be the one that leads to the least progressive tax possible being chosen in each country.     

Minimum Quality Standards Under Cournot Competition

I study the consequences of imposing a minimum quality standard on an industry in which firms first incur fixed quality development costs and subsequently compete over quantity. I find that a mildly restrictive minimum quality standard unambiguously reduces total welfare, in contrast to previous findings derived in the literature where it is assumed that firms compete over prices.     

Compatibility Standards And Industry Competition: Two Case Studies

Case histories of two data communication interfaces provide evidence of complex strategic behavior in the setting of voluntary compatibility standards. These cases show how subtle differences in the design of standards development organizations affect incentives to cooperate, giving rise to systematic venue preferences. Dominant firms prefer more bureaucratic procedures offering greater protection for the status quo. The two interfaces, FDDI (under development in X3) and DQDB (under development in the IEEE) shed light on competition between the computer and telecommunications industries and the evolution of our communications infrastructure. They demonstrate the importance of standards for intra- and inter-industry competition.     

劳工标准与我国国际竞争力

劳工标准已经成为我国不可回避的问题,我们迫切需要弄清楚劳工标准与中国国家竞争力的关系。本文首先对劳工标准的内涵进行了探讨,界定劳工标准为国际劳工组织中核心劳工标准和劳动力价格或成本;在对国家竞争力的内涵进行探讨后,界定国家竞争力为竞争结果和影响因素两方面;然后对我国劳工标准与国家竞争力的关系进行了实证研究,并在此基础上提出了提高我国国际竞争力的对策。     

Developing Country Second‐Mover Advantage in Competition Over Environmental Standards and Taxes

We show that, in competition between a developed country and a developing country over environmental standards and taxes, the developing country may have a “second‐mover advantage.” In our model, firms do not unanimously prefer lower environmental standard levels. We introduce this feature to an otherwise familiar model of fiscal competition. Four distinct outcomes can be characterized by varying the marginal cost to firms of an environmental externality: (1) the outcome may be efficient; (2) the developing country may be a “pollution haven”—a place to escape excessively high environmental standards in the developed country; (3) the developing country may “undercut” the developed country and attract all firms; (4) the developed country may be a pollution haven.     

对抗竞争·合作竞争·超越竞争

随着经济发展的不同阶段,企业的竞争也经历了不同的导向阶段。如今,各界对于激烈的对抗竞争已有了比较清晰的看法,提倡企业间采取合作竞争。为实现企业的持久优势,理论界也提出了超越竞争的理论。本文尝试分析从对抗竞争到合作竞争再到超越竞争这一发展主线各个阶段的优劣。     

Migration and pension

"Migration has important implications for the financial soundness of the pension system.... While it is common sense to expect that young migrants, even if low-skilled, can help society pay the benefits to the currently elderly, it may nevertheless be reasonable to argue that these migrants would adversely affect current young since, after all, the migrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state. In contrast to the adverse effects of low skilled migration in a static model, [the authors] show that in a Samuelsonian overlapping generations model...migration is a Pareto-improving measure. All the existing income (low and high) and age (young and old) groups living at the time of the migrant's arrival would be better off."     

GATT/WTO框架中环境标准和劳工标准

从环境标准和劳工标准的视角,探究GATT/WTO在尊重国家主权和提高全球效率之间寻找平衡的制度安排.在引入关税和国内环境标准与劳工标准的模型中,产生单边的贸易政策引起的非效率均衡点.而在GATT/WTO构建的多边贸易协定平台上,能解决国内和国际环境与劳工标准的分歧,增加贸易的透明度,达到更有效率的互惠贸易均衡点.     

Competition and microfinance

Competition between microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries has increased dramatically in the last decade. We model the behavior of non-profit lenders, and show that their non-standard, client-maximizing objectives cause them to cross-subsidize within their pool of borrowers. Thus when competition eliminates rents on profitable borrowers, it is likely to yield a new equilibrium in which poor borrowers are worse off. As competition exacerbates asymmetric information problems over borrower indebtedness, the most impatient borrowers begin to obtain multiple loans, creating a negative externality that leads to less favorable equilibrium loan contracts for all borrowers.     

Regional Insurance and Migration

A dynamic model of migration is developed to study whether labor mobility can hedge people against region-specific shocks, making private or public insurance redundant. The model adopts a novel timing for migration, which is argued to be the time frame suitable for analyzing risk-sharing issues. It also innovates on the existing literature by solving individual migration through convexification of the set of actions. The results show that the role of migration as an insurance mechanism is small: labor mobility cannot fully remove income differentials between regions. It is also shown that a fiscal stabilization scheme is, in general, optimal; moreover, any pure risk-sharing mechanism has no influence on migration flows.     

Mass Media Competition, Political Competition, and Public Policy

If better informed voters receive favourable policies, then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting. This paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups. The increasing-returns-to-scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups, such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests, and groups that are valuable to advertisers. This news bias alters the trade-off in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy. The paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics. The model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters.     

Surplus Extraction and Competition

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have correlated private information about their valuations. In contrast to the monopoly case where sellers charge entry fees and extract all buyers' surplus, it is shown that in the unique symmetric equilibrium with competition, sellers hold second price auctions with reserve prices set equal to their cost. Most important, it is a best reply for sellers not to charge entry fees of the kind normally used to extract surplus, even though it is feasible for them to do so.     

兼并和伯特兰德竞争的价格效应分析

本文采用博弈论方法研究兼并和伯特兰德竞争对价格、竞争等的影响.首先,分布在两个市场中的寡头公司分别选择同市场或跨市场的兼并活动,其次,两个市场中的寡头公司进行伯特兰德竞争.结论显示,有关需求函数的各种约束条件是决定价格升高或下降的关键因素,从而揭示了价格效应产生的原理.美国航空业的案例研究支持模型的基本结论.     

Divestment and Bank Competition

We determine optimal divestment (partial privatization) and entry in banking in the context of a mixed oligopoly. When banks compete in deposits, greater entry is associated with higher divestment. However, social welfare improves with entry only when the private entrants are more efficient than the public bank. Further, when banks compete in interest rates with differentiated products, the public banks behavior resembles that of a price leader and it earns less profit than the private bank, if government holding in the public bank is sufficiently high. Competition becomes excessive in this case, and social welfare maximization requires greater divestment.     

Paternalism and Tax Competition

When consumers make mistakes, the government may wish to use paternalistic taxation as a corrective measure. We analyse the extent to which tax competition undermines the feasibility of paternalistic taxation. We show that the paternalistic component of a tax on a harmful good is reduced when there is cross-border shopping, but it does not disappear altogether. In a model with tax competition between two countries, only one of which has a paternalistic objective, we show that a minimum tax rate requirement can be Pareto improving despite the divergence in policy objectives. Tax harmonization, however, reduces welfare in the non-paternalistic country.     

技术标准选择:中小企业竞争的起点——基于公权标准和事实标准的思考

公权标准和事实标准的并行使标准化过程呈多样化趋势,中小企业在拥有更多选择的同时,也面临着更大的标准化风险。中小企业在标准化活动中应遵循市场导向、效益最大化、系统性和可持续发展原则,尽量采用不同范围的公权标准,有选择参与不同类型的标准制定过程,努力构建"为我所用"的标准资源。