住宅智能化、消费者异质性与支付意愿——基于技术接受模型的实证分析

智能时代的到来使得智能化新产品成为人们广泛关注的焦点,住宅产业也在经历智能化的转变。本文从消费者的角度,基于技术接受模型(TAM),构建了住宅智能化对于消费者支付意愿的影响模型并对其进行实证研究。研究结果表明：住宅智能化能够通过满足消费者对住宅功能的需求进而提升消费者的支付意愿,消费者异质性对智能化住宅和支付意愿的关系具有调节作用。年轻群体和低收入群体更关注智能化住宅的基本居住功能和生活品质功能;未婚消费者更关注智能化住宅的生活品质功能,已婚群体对住宅智能化的支付意愿更高;低收入群体相比高收入群体对住宅智能化的支付意愿更高;高教育配套需求者、有会所需求和有装修需求的消费者对住宅智能化的支付意愿更强烈。     

Complementarity of willingness to pay and cost heterogeneity under vertical product differentiation: A welfare analysis

Due to the fact that a consumer’s willingness to pay differs between segments, many unregulated industries are price constrained, although the specific costs of market segments also differ. If the product quality is endogenously chosen, we find that third-degree price discrimination increases welfare if a sufficiently pronounced complementarity between the willingness to pay and variable cost heterogeneity is given. This is due to the fact that the monopolist’s incentive for employing a pronounced price dispersion strategy is directly influenced by the consumers’ willingness to pay for the quality of a product. With endogenous product quality, the paper shows that the standard welfare result of third-degree price discrimination compared to uniform monopoly pricing (e.g. that total welfare and consumer surplus both fall if total output does not rise) can be only reversed given the complementarity is sufficiently pronounced.     

Monopolists and viscous demand

We characterize the optimal dynamic price policy of a monopolist who faces “viscous” demand for its services. Demand is viscous if it adjusts relatively slowly to price changes. We show that with the optimal policy the monopolist stops short of achieving 100% market penetration, even when all of the consumers have the same long-run willingness to pay for the service. Furthermore, for certain parameter values in the model, the price policy requires rapid oscillations of the price path.     

Ticket pricing and the impression of excess demand

If willingness to pay depends on characteristics of other attendees, a monopolist will use a lineup as a screening mechanism only if a consumer's characteristic is inversely related to her cost of lining up. No capacity constraint is necessary.     

Optimal contract under brand name collaboration

In an international Cournot duopoly, we determine the optimal contract for a brand name collaboration where the contract consists of fixed-fee and output royalty. We show that the firms always have the incentive for brand name collaboration. However, whether the optimal contract will have positive fixed-fee and positive royalty is not immediate and it depends on the factors such as the transportation cost of exporting and the consumers' initial perception about the products of the firms reflected in the consumers' maximum willingness to pay for the products. Thus, our paper shows that the possibility of brand name collaboration is significantly more than predicted in the existing literature.     

DURABLE GOODS MONOPOLISTS AND BACKWARD COMPATIBILITY*

This paper provides an economic analysis on the choice of backward compatibility by a durable goods monopolist in the presence of network effects. We examine the time inconsistency problem faced by a monopolist in its dynamic provision of two compatible products. We suggest an economic reason why, and when it will be strategically optimal, for the monopolist to choose backward compatibility even though it is socially undesirable, and not to choose forward compatibility even though it is technologically possible. We also investigate the compatibility choices with and without price discrimination, and compare market outcomes with the social optimum. Two different social inefficiencies (planned obsolescence) which arise from the viewpoints of optimal consumption and optimal compatibility are discussed.     

Eco-labels, Trade and Protectionism

Eco-labels are suspected to serve protectionist purposes. We analyze the choice between an environmental standard and a voluntary eco-label scheme in a partial trade model with one domestic firm and one foreign firm. The environmental standard will only apply to the domestic firm, while both firms can adopt the eco-label. Pollution is production related, and domestic consumers demand products that are produced in an “environmentally friendly” way. Our results show that it may be optimal for the domestic government to introduce an eco-label and get both firms to adopt the label, instead of setting an environmental standard. However, to what extent this policy serves protectionist purposes is ambiguous. In particular, if the willingness to pay for green products is sufficient to cover the pollution abatement costs of the foreign firm, foreign firm profit will increase while domestic firm profit will decrease compared to the outcome with a domestic environmental standard. On the other hand, if the willingness to pay for green products is insufficient, the foreign firm would be better off with a domestic environmental standard.     

Strategic Policy and Environmental Quality: Helping the Domestic Industry to Provide Credible Information

This paper shows that a country can improve an industry's competitiveness by requiring domestic firms to produce at the environmental standards at which they claim to produce or otherwise impose a penalty on those firms found cheating. Competitiveness will improve because this regulation will help the domestic industry to provide credible information about the environmental quality of its production. The credible information will differentiate domestic products from other products on the world market, and in this way increase consumers' willingness to pay for domestic products. Even if the government has no preferences for environmental quality, it has incentives to regulate its cheaters in order to help the domestic industry to provide credible information and thereby improve competitiveness.     

Corporate Social Responsibility Spillover and Competition Effects on the Food Industry

This paper examines the spillover and competition effects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) with duopoly competition. In employing the assumption that firm CSR increases consumer willingness to pay for the firm's products while consumer willingness to pay decreases for non‐CSR firm products, some interesting conclusions are achieved. First, CSR spillover effects increase CSR firm outputs and prices, while CSR spillover has the opposite effect on competitors. Second, CSR spillover decreases total outputs and total social welfare levels. Third, competition effects increase CSR expenditures, and CSR firms' CSR policies are the most robust when non‐CSR firms assume a leading position. It is found that total outputs and consumer utilities are highest when CSR firm acts as leader, while the relationships of social welfare among different cases are ambiguous depending on product substitution and spillover effects.     

Bundling and Optimal Auctions of Multiple Products

We study the optimal ( i.e. revenue maximizing) auction of multiple products. We make three major points. First, we extend the relationship between price discrimination and optimal auctions from the single-product case to the multiple-product case. A monopolist setting prices for multiple products may offer discounts on purchases of bundles of products; similarly, the optimal auction of multiple products facilitates price discrimination by allocating products inefficiently to customers who are willing to purchase both products. Second, we demonstrate that optimal auctions are qualitatively distinct from monopoly sales of multiple products. Because of uncertainty about the values of other consumers, two products are bundled probabilistically in an optimal auction for a customer who is willing to buy both of them. A customer may then receive a discount on a lower-valued product without receiving a higher-valued product. Third, we show that in an optimal auction of two products the allocation of one product may vary with the amount of competition for the other product.     

A decomposition of monopolistic quality distortion

The quality distortion caused by a linear pricing monopolist is separated into two components; one measures the imbalance of quality and quantity (the skewed component) and the other measures the restriction of production to increase marginal willingness to pay (the unskewed component). Conditions identifying the direction of quality distortion caused by each of these components are presented. Fundamental special cases of preferences and costs, which are useful representation in a variety of contexts, are analyzed using this framework.     

Process R&;D and Product Line Deletion by a Multiproduct Monopolist

Relative to single-product firms, a multiproduct monopolist can internalize the negative externalities of its R&D investments (the ``cannibalization effect') in two ways: (1) To lower R&D investment for each product; and (2) To delete some of its product lines so as to enlarge the market size for the remaining lines. It is shown that line deletion is profitable if products are close substitutes. If products are not close substitutes, the multiproduct monopolist keeps all product lines and invests less in cost-reducing R&D than single-product firms engaging in Cournot competition with product differentiation. However, it invests more in R&D than single-product firms if there are significant economies of scope in R&D, or if the oligopolistic firms can cooperate in their R&D decisions.      

Monopoly and the choice of product characteristics

Monopoly firms producing large, indivisible goods may be able to effect perfect price discrimination by charging an all-or-none implicit price for each product characteristic. In that case, a monopolist will provide the same vector of product characteristics (i.e., the same product ‘quality’) as will a competitive industry; and, perhaps more surprisingly, produce the same quantity of the good. With all-or-none pricing, monopoly power leads to a higher product price, but no change in product quality or output.     

Dynamic control of a monopolist’s product and process innovation with reference quality

ABSTRACT

Our main purpose is to investigate the dynamic control problem of a monopolist’s product and process innovation under reference quality. The main features of this article are: (i) a monopolist dealing with customer behaviour in the spirit of the principle of behaviour economics determines the product price, and carries out the activities of product and process innovation; (ii) the consumers’ demand depends on price, product quality and reference quality, and adopts an additive separable demand function form. Our main results show that under the cases of the monopolist optimum and the social planner optimum, (i) there exists an unique stable, which is a saddle-point steady-state equilibrium; (ii) the change rates of the monopolist’s investments in product and process innovation are increasing with the reference quality, while the monopolist’s steady-state investments in product and process innovation are decreasing with the reference quality; (iii) as the memory parameter increases with other parameters kept constant, it is very likely that the monopolist’s investment in process innovation be greater than the investment in product innovation; and (iv) the social incentive towards both investments in product and process innovation is always larger than the private incentive characterizing the profit-seeking monopolist.     

Socially excessive dissemination of patent licences

Abstract .  Compared with the social optimum, a monopolist usually sells too little. This result seemingly includes the case of a lab that licences its patented cost innovation: Katz and Shapiro (1986) find 'conditions under which [the lab] will issue fewer than the socially optimal number of licences.' However, I find instead that its incentives can be socially too high; the monopoly seller may sell too much. For example, it can be profit maximizing to sell several licences, while it is socially optimal that none is sold.     

Advance-purchase discounts as a price discrimination device

In an intertemporal setting in which individual uncertainty is resolved over time, advance-purchase discounts can serve to price discriminate between consumers with different expected valuations for the product. Consumers with a high expected valuation purchase the product before learning their actual valuation at the offered advance-purchase discount; consumers with a low expected valuation will wait and purchase the good at the regular price only in the event where their realized valuation is high. We characterize the profit-maximizing pricing strategy of the monopolist. Furthermore, adopting a mechanism design perspective, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition under which advance-purchase discounts implement the monopolist's optimal mechanism.     

Behavioural responses to science-based eco-labelling: gold,silver, or bronze

This study uses unique data collected from field experiments to investigate consumer willingness to pay (WTP) for otherwise homogeneous commodities that provide different levels of environmental services. On average, individuals are willing to pay more for products that provide a higher level of ecosystem services. This effect is larger when the label contains symbols that explicitly differentiate the levels. The effect magnitude is further amplified when it contains brief information on the scientific basis for the levels. However, our results also suggest that the WTP premium for the superior product is smaller than the discount in WTP for the inferior product.     

Repair Market Structure, Product Durability, and Monopoly

This paper shows that a durable goods monopolist makes consumers choose a level of repairs which is below the socially optimal level if it monopolises the repair market as well. This distortion occurs due to the possibility of substituting new and used goods and a time inconsistency problem concerning repair decisions. However, if the monopolist is unable to commit the repair price, it may prefer to invite competitors into the repair market. If the repair market is competitive, even when the product market is monopolistic, the socially optimal level of repairs, and thus also the socially optimal durability level is chosen.     

Can green consumerism replace environmental regulation?—a differentiated-products example

This paper assumes that consumers are willing to pay an extra premium for a good if it has a low impact on the environment. We examine if a little dose of such idealistic behavior has a large impact on the market equilibrium, and to what extent it can replace the environmental regulation. The analysis is carried out in a model with product differentiation, where consumers differ in their preferences for product quality. Consumers’ willingness to pay the environmental premium may be uniformly or non-uniformly distributed. Green consumerism will only be modestly influential in both cases, despite the fact that product differentiation leads to relaxed competition and increased profits, and thereby creates leverage.     

Racing in two dimensions

In this paper we study an industry in which there is an ongoing sequence of R&D races between two firms. Firms are engaged in product innovation. Products are horizontally and vertically differentiated. There are two key characteristics/dimensions to products, and the level at which these are embodied in products can be increased by R&D. At each time firms can spend R&D on improving their product in one or both dimensions. We allow the possibility of economies scope — so R&D undertaken in one dimension can spillover to the other. The question we are interested in is whether a firm that is ahead in a single dimension but behind in another will focus all its R&D effort in the area in which it is ahead (product specialisation), or whether it will try to do R&D in both dimensions in the hope that it might get ahead in both and end up with a superproduct that dominates in both characteristics. The outcome of this R&D competition determines a Markov transition probability matrix determining the evolution of the industry. We show that when the R&D technology is characterized by constant returns then the only steady-state outcome is one in which the economy stays forever in a position in which one firm produces a super-product and the other gives up doing R&D altogether. This outcome is unaffected by the degree of economies of scope. When the R&D technology is characterised by decreasing returns, then the industry will visit all states and so will exhibit both product specialisation and superproduct dominance at various times. Now the extent of economies of scope matters and we show that the greater the extent of economies of scope, the less likely is the industry to exhibit product dominance, and the more likely it is to exhibit product specialisation.