The Red–Green Channel Dilemma: Customs Declaration and Optimal Inspection Policy

Despite the evolvement of an extensive literature on the economics of smuggling, the evasion of customs duties under the common red–green channel system has failed to attract any theoretical attention. The present paper develops a simple three‐passenger‐type model to examine the passenger's decision of whether to pass through the green or red channel, as well as to derive the optimal inspection policy for a revenue‐maximizing customs authority. The analysis reveals that if net revenue collection when inducing truthful declaration is positive, it is never optimal for the customs authority to provide incentives for passing through the green channel, although it may be optimal to provide incentives for cheating at the red channel. However, if the penalty for evasion is large enough to wipe out passengers' income, providing incentives for passing through the green channel may be the optimal policy.     

EXPORT AND HEDGING DECISIONS UNDER CORRELATED REVENUE AND EXCHANGE RATE RISK

This paper examines the behaviour of a competitive exporting firm under joint revenue and exchange rate risk. The firm can trade unbiased currency futures contracts for hedging purposes. We show that neither the separation theorem nor the full‐hedging theorem holds when the revenue shock prevails. If the correlation between the revenue shock and the random spot exchange rate is non‐positive, the firm optimally produces less than the benchmark level when the revenue shock is absent. If, in addition, the firm is prudent, the optimal futures position is an under‐hedge. Finally, we derive sufficient conditions under which the firm's optimal output level is higher in the presence than in the absence of the revenue shock. Operational hedging and financial hedging as such interact in a complicated way to better cope with the multiple sources of uncertainty faced by the firm.     

The optimal choice of pre-launch reviewer

We develop a framework in which: (i) a firm can have a new product tested publicly before launch; and (ii) tests vary in toughness, holding expertise fixed. Price flexibility boosts the positive impact on consumer beliefs of passing a tough test and mitigates the negative impact of failing a soft test. As a result, profits are convex in toughness: the firm selects either the toughest or softest test available. The toughest test is optimal when consumers start with an unfavorable prior and receive sufficiently uninformative private signals (an “innovative” product); the softest test is optimal when signals are sufficiently informative.     

Partial privatization in mixed duopoly with price and quality competition

We analyze price and quality competition in a mixed duopoly in which a profit-maximizing private firm competes against a state-owned public firm. We first show that the welfare-maximizing public firm provides a lower quality product than the private firm when they are equally efficient. In order to maximize social welfare, government manipulates the objective of the public firm that is given by a convex combination of profits and social welfare. It is demonstrated that an optimal incentive of the public firm is welfare maximization under the absence of quality competition, but it is neither welfare maximization nor profit maximization under the presence of quality competition. The result supports a completely mixed objective between welfare and profit maximizations or partial privatization of the public firm.      

Manipulable behavior in international trade

In this paper, we present a Cournot duopoly model to analyze the manipulated behavior in international trade. The WTO is assumed as an arbitrator for the exchange in an oligopolistic industry and sets tariff rules according to the SDT principles; a firm's cost is private information both for the WTO and the foreign rivalries. Subsequent to our analysis of several cases we find that a firm may misreport to the WTO for more production revenue and the government may collude with a firm for higher welfare. It is shown that the misreporting and collusion incentives are related to the WTO tariff rule, the misreported cost and market size. Furthermore, a strategy proof tariff rule has been designed in which firms can never make his revenue better off by misreporting production cost.     

Taxation of firms with unknown mobility

We analyze optimal business tax policy when some firms are able to escape taxation by moving abroad. In contrast to the existing literature, we assume that the true number of mobile firms is ex ante unknown. While the government may learn from the firms' location responses to past tax rate changes, firms may anticipate this and adjust their choices accordingly. We find that incomplete information on mobility substantially affects the properties and the implications of equilibrium policy choices. First, the government may find it optimal to set a tax rate that triggers partial firm migration but full revelation of the true number of mobile firms. Second, we show that, if the firms' outside option is attractive (i.e., relocation cost and foreign tax rates are low), expected tax rates and expected firm migration are higher if the degree of mobility is unknown. Third, there is a positive value of learning, i.e., commitment on future tax rates cannot increase the government's expected revenue. However, if the government can commit to a rule‐based learning mechanism, i.e., credibly tie its future tax policy to present policy outcomes, it may obtain a Pareto improvement.     

Optimal privatization and uniform subsidy policies: A note

The privatization neutrality theorem states that the share of public ownership in a firm does not affect welfare under an optimal uniform tax‐subsidy policy. We revisit this neutrality result. First, we investigate the case in which the private firm is domestic. We show that this neutrality result does not hold unless public and private firms have the same cost function. Next, we investigate a case in which both domestic and foreign investors own the private firm. We show that the optimal degree of privatization is never zero, and thus, the neutrality result does not hold, even when there is no cost difference between public and private firms.     

Stable market structures from merger activities in mixed oligopoly with asymmetric costs

This paper examines endogenous merger formations in a mixed oligopoly. Applying the core as a solution concept, we analyze which market structure(s) remain(s) stable when three firms—two symmetric private firms and one inefficient public firm—are allowed to merge with each other in a mixed Cournot industry. We show that according to the value of the marginal cost of the public firm, there always exists a pair of share ratios of the owners of both the (pre-merged) public firm and the (pre-merged) private firm such that the market structure with the merger between the public firm and one private firm belongs to the core. When the initial market structure is a mixed triopoly, it can only be blocked when one public firm and one private firm merge. Furthermore, we conduct a similar analysis in a general mixed oligopoly with one public firm and n private firms.      

IMMEDIATE SETTLEMENT OR ENDURING A STRIKE: THE CHOICE OF SIGNALS

Some labour contract negotiations involve strikes while most conclude with immediate settlement. This article offers a model of union‐firm negotiation with private information to show that either strikes or immediate settlement will take place in the equilibrium. Different from most signalling literature where the signals are exogenously given, this article endogenizes the choice of signals. We compare two signals, the employment level and the strategic delay. We show that the low‐revenue firm will choose the signal which gives it higher payoff while separating itself from the high‐revenue firm.     

Unobservable persistent productivity and long term contracts

We study the problem of a firm that faces asymmetric information about the persistent productivity of its potential workers. In our framework, a worker's productivity is either assigned by nature at birth, or determined by an unobservable initial action of the worker that has persistent effects over time. We provide a characterization of the optimal dynamic compensation scheme that attracts only high productivity workers: consumption—regardless of time period—is ranked according to likelihood ratios of output histories, and the inverse of the marginal utility of consumption satisfies the martingale property derived in [Rogerson, William P., 1985. Repeated moral hazard. Econometrica 53 (1) 69–76]. However, in the case of i.i.d. output and square root utility we show that, contrary to the features of the optimal contract for a repeated moral hazard problem, the level and the variance of consumption are negatively correlated, due to the influence of early luck into future compensation. Moreover, in this example long-term inequality is lower under persistent private information.     

COLLUSION,FLUCTUATING DEMAND,AND PRICE RIGIDITY*

We study an infinitely repeated Bertrand game in which an i.i.d. demand shock occurs in each period. Each firm receives a private signal about the demand shock at the beginning of each period. At the end of each period, all information but the private signals becomes public. We consider the optimal symmetric perfect public equilibrium (SPPE) mainly for patient firms. We show that price rigidity arises in the optimal SPPE if the accuracy of the private signals is low. We also study the implications of more firms and firms' impatience on collusive pricing.     

Implementation without incentive compatibility: Two stories with partially informed planners

We consider two stories, Typhoon by Conrad and Traveler's Dilemma by Basu, 1994, Basu, 2007, as implementation problems under incomplete information without incentive compatibility, but where the planner has some private information regarding the state. If social choice functions do not satisfy incentive compatibility, full implementation is unattainable via existing approaches. For each story, we construct a direct mechanism that relies on the planner's private information. We provide a sufficient condition on players' beliefs regarding the state under which every player has a unique rationalizable action, namely, telling the truth. Thus, in these stories, the planner's information can bypass the lack of incentive compatibility.     

Optimal tax policy and foreign direct investment under ambiguity

We analyze the optimal timing of an irreversible foreign direct investment by a foreign firm and the optimal tax policy by a host country under ambiguity. We derive the optimal GDP level at which the foreign firm switches from exporting to a foreign direct investment. Furthermore, we derive the optimal tax policy by the host country, and analyze the effect of an increase in ambiguity on the optimal tax policy. We show that the host country should reduce the optimal corporate tax rate from the host government’s perspective in response to an increase in ambiguity. Our result is different from the one obtained by Pennings (2005) that shows that an increase in risk induces an increase in the optimal corporate tax rate.     

Dynamic Moral Hazard and Executive Stock Options

This paper shows that the optimal executive compensation scheme in a dynamic moral hazard environment is convex in the firm value. This implies that the optimal contract should include stock options. This is because the private benefit of shirking is increasing in firm value and the manager's utility is concave. Therefore, in contrast to the previous literature that takes stock options in the incentive contract exogenously, we rationalize the optimality of their use endogenously. Moreover, we show that the optimal amount of stock options (restricted stocks) increases with agency cost and the executive's reservation utility, decreases with the degree of risk aversion of the manager, and increases (decreases) with the firm size.     

On the continuous equilibria of affiliated-value,all-pay auctions with private budget constraints

We consider all-pay auctions in the presence of interdependent, affiliated valuations and private budget constraints. For the sealed-bid, all-pay auction we characterize a symmetric equilibrium in continuous strategies for the case of N bidders. Budget constraints encourage more aggressive bidding among participants with large endowments and intermediate valuations. We extend our results to the war of attrition where we show that budget constraints lead to a uniform amplification of equilibrium bids among bidders with sufficient endowments. An example shows that with both interdependent valuations and private budget constraints, a revenue ranking between the two auction formats is generally not possible. Equilibria with discontinuous bidding strategies are discussed.     

Asymptotic Revenue Equivalence in Auctions

We study the revenue in auctions of a single object when the number of bidders becomes large. We show that all sequences of auctions belonging to a class of mechanisms have limiting expected revenue equal to the expected best-use value of the object. An important special case that is covered is common value auctions, but more generally not even affiliation of values is assumed. This provides an asymptotic revenue equivalence result for settings beyond that of private values. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D44, C72.     

Regulating a Monopolist with Unknown Demand: Costly Public Funds and the Value of Private Information

In this paper, we analyze the optimal regulation policy when the regulated firm has better information concerning the market demand than the regulator. We show that introducing a cost on public funds into the Planner's objective function does not lead to qualitative results similar to those obtained by introducing distributional considerations. In particular we show that under constant marginal cost the full information policy is not implementable and that the optimal regulatory policy results in informational rents. The social value of private information and the firm's informational rents are both increasing functions of the cost of the public funds.     

THE REVENUE‐SHARING RULE FOR INTERCONNECTION CHARGES*

In this paper we explore the economic principle behind the revenue‐sharing rule for interconnection charges. Our main finding is that symmetric firms can collude by splitting the revenues equally. We further characterize the optimal revenue‐sharing ratio and discuss the relationship between optimal ratio and the optimal access price. We also show that the revenue‐sharing rule can have the perverse effect of inducing a firm to raise its own costs in order to gain a higher share of revenues.     

Learning through experimentation in an oligopoly market with asymmetric information

Unlike previous literature, in which firms compete in the market with the same information, this article analyses a two‐period duopoly game in which only one firm is completely informed about the market conditions, whereas the other firm is unaware of one parameter of the demand curve. In this setting, we describe how the informed firm uses its price set in period 1 in order to reveal or to hide its private information and how the uninformed firm uses its own price in period 1 in order to learn the market conditions when they are not revealed by its rival. Specifically, we obtained the conditions under which the informed firm sets a higher price than its optimum in the first period to hide its private information in certain cases and to reveal that information in others. Likewise, this paper describes the conditions under which the uninformed firm sets a lower price than its optimum in period 1 in order to learn the unknown parameter. We found that the informed firm's cost of revealing its private information to its rival is lower than the uninformed firm's cost of learning the market conditions.     

Endogenous timing in a mixed oligopoly with semipublic firms

An endogenous order of moves is analyzed in a mixed market where a firm jointly owned by the public sector and private domestic shareholders (a semipublic firm) competes with n private firms. We show that there is an equilibrium in which firms take production decisions simultaneously. This result is strikingly different from that obtained by Pal (Econ Lett 61:181–185, 1998), who shows that when a public firm competes with n private firms all firms producing simultaneously in the same period cannot be sustained as a Subgame Perfect Nash Equilibrium outcome. Our result differs from that of Pal (Econ Lett 61:181–185, 1998) for two reasons: firstly, we consider that there is a semipublic firm rather than a public firm. Secondly, Pal (Econ Lett 61:181–185, 1998) considers that the public firm is less efficient than private firms while in our paper all firms are equally efficient.