Collusion and biased tournaments

Tournaments are vulnerable to collusion. This paper finds that biased tournaments can be more effective at preventing collusion than unbiased ones. When agents can collude to exert low effort, introducing some bias into tournaments generates opposite effects on favored and disfavored agents׳ respective incentives to exert high effort and provides strong incentives for the favored agent to deviate from collusion. Introducing an adequate degree of bias reduces the principal׳s incentive cost for preventing collusion; however, granting excessive bias instead increases the incentive cost. We show that the optimal level of bias can be endogenously determined.     

Collusion and Price Rigidity

We consider an infinitely repeated Bertrand game, in which prices are publicly observed and each firm receives a privately observed, i.i.d. cost shock in each period. We focus on symmetric perfect public equilibria, wherein any "punishments" are borne equally by all firms. We identify a tradeoff that is associated with collusive pricing schemes in which the price to be charged by each firm is strictly increasing in its cost level: such "fully sorting" schemes offer efficiency benefits, as they ensure that the lowest-cost firm makes the current sale, but they also imply an informational cost (distorted pricing and/or equilibrium-path price wars), since a higher-cost firm must be deterred from mimicking a lower-cost firm by charging a lower price. A rigid-pricing scheme, where a firm's collusive price is independent of its current cost position, sacrifices efficiency benefits but also diminishes the informational cost. For a wide range of settings, the optimal symmetric collusive scheme requires (i) the absence of equilibrium-path price wars and (ii) a rigid price. If firms are sufficiently impatient, however, the rigid-pricing scheme cannot be enforced, and the collusive price of lower-cost firms may be distorted downward in order to diminish the incentive to cheat. When the model is modified to include i.i.d. public demand shocks, the downward pricing distortion that accompanies a firm's lower-cost realization may occur only when current demand is high.     

环境监管中的博弈分析

通过建立环境监管问题的完全信息动态博弈模型,文章证明了在适宜的制度环境条件下,合谋可能是企业与地方政府的最优选择。针对优化制度环境,文章提出要加大来自上级政府的监督与制裁力度,改革地方政府的绩效考评制度等政策建议,以期改善地方环境状况。     

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.     

Exchange Agreements Facilitate Collusion

A duopoly model with quantity competition is analyzed in which firms collude in two markets. There is specialization in production in order to promote efficiency. Firms may then either exclusively market one good each, or they may agree to exchange goods and cross-supply a part of the production to the other firm. It is shown that, compared to specialization in marketing, positive exchanges of goods relax the incentive constraints that limit the extent of collusion.     

Collusion and discrimination in organizations

In a principal-multi-agent setting we investigate how optimal contracts should be modified under relative performance evaluation when agents collude. Agents may write side-contracts, which are not contingent on their effort choices but indirectly control them through side-transfers. We show that the optimal collusion-proof contract is to introduce a “discriminatory policy” in the sense that the wage schemes offered to agents depend on their identities even if they are identical with respect to productive abilities. Such discriminatory wage schemes explain the organizational strategy of “divide and conquer” as an optimal response to collusion.     

论二元经济结构条件下西部发展极的金融支持

我国西部地区存在典型的二元经济结构特征。一个地区经济增长的启动，在相当程度上取决于该地区资金积累能力和资金使用效率。因此，要想较好地解决西部经济发展的二元结构问题。必须结合我国具体国情，发挥西部金融机构在不同层面的金融支持作用。     

Collusion in one-shot second-price auctions

Summary. Most of the literature on collusive behavior in auctions ignores two important issues that make collusion difficult to sustain at least in one-shot interactions: the detection of cheating and the verification of bids. Colluding bidders may deceive each other by using shill bidders. Also, if the identities of the bidders and their bids are not published then it would be difficult to verify the bid of a colluding bidder. This paper addresses these problems in one shot second price auctions where one bidder offers another bidder a side payment in exchange for not participating in the auction, while the number of other bidders is stochastic. In spite of the barriers to collusion mentioned above, a simple side payment mechanism which depends only on the auction price is introduced. It induces a successful collusion, eliminates the verification problem, provides no incentive for the use of shill bidders and guarantees that the proponent obtains ex-post non-negative payoff. The colluding bidders are ex-ante strictly better off compared with the competitive case, irrespective of their types.Received: 27 November 2002, Revised: 28 January 2005, JEL Classification Numbers: C72, D44, D82.Yair Tauman: Correspondence toWe would like to thank an anonymous referee for very valuable comments and suggestions that significantly improved the paper. We thank Shmuel Zamir for a helpful discussion.     

Merger,Partial Collusion and Relocation

We set up a three-firm model of spatial competition to analyse how a merger affects the incentives for relocation, and conversely, how the possibility of relocation affects the profitability of the merger, particularly for the non-participating firm. We also consider the cases of partial collusion in either prices or locations. Under the assumption of mill pricing, we find that a merger will generally induce the merger participants to relocate, but the direction of relocation is ambiguous, and dependent on the degree of convexity in the consumers transportation cost function. Furthermore, we identify a set of parameter values for which the free-rider effect of a merger vanishes, implying that the possibility of relocation could solve the merger paradox.Acknowledgement We thank Jonathan Cave, Frode Meland, participants at the Royal Economic Society Conference 2003 and an anonymous referee for valuable comments.     

Taxation Reform: Some Economic Issues

The Australian system of Commonwealth and State taxes is in need of comprehensive reform. It fails the criteria of neutrality, horizontal equity and simplicity, it is not as progressive as often thought, and the future revenue base is declining. Many of the problems stem from the absence of comprehensive tax bases as applied to income, expenditure and assets, and related choice options are subjected to very different effective tax burdens. Important choice options facing different effective tax rates include: work and leisure; consumption and saving; different saving and investment options; form of labour remuneration; different ways of production; the mix of goods and services produced and consumed; and, domestic or overseas location.
A comprehensive income tax base is required, especially as applied to the taxation of capital income. The options of a nominal income, real income or expenditure base are explored.
It is argued that reform of indirect taxes proceed along two lines. The general revenue raising purpose leads to a comprehensive base of final consumption expenditure at a single rate. Then, additional specific taxes for user pays purposes, for example for roads, and for externalities, for example tobacco, set at the supply cost or net externality would be applied.
There are conflicting arguments for and against changing the tax mix away from income to expenditure.     

关于总部经济发展的若干思考

总部经济在本质上是一种聚集经济,其作为产业集群发展的必然趋势,已成为现代区域及城市经济发展的一种选择模式。通过企业总部的集聚,借助外部经济效应,能够使集聚区域内的企业广泛相互受益,进而带动整个区域的经济结构调整与发展。文章分析了形成总部经济的经济学机理,并以发展总部经济的条件为基础,提出了促进总部经济发展的建议。     

Collusion in homogeneous and heterogeneous tournaments

In tournaments, only the relative performance of agents is important. Therefore, the agents have an incentive to collude by jointly deviating to low effort levels. Previous papers on collusion have proposed to make the tournament asymmetric to prevent agents from colluding. However, by allowing side payments between the agents and focusing on implicit enforcement of collusion, the current study demonstrates that this is not true. Often, the principal prefers to hire homogeneous agents to make collusions less stable.     

对区域经济一体化的几点思考

区域经济一体化是经济全球化过程中的表现形式 ,区域性经济组织的独特作用越来越引起人们的广泛关注 ,中国以其独特的地理位置 ,丰富的人力资源和强劲的经济发展势头 ,应该在区域经济组织中发挥重要作用 ,以迅速提升我国的经济技术水平。     

Reciprocal Supervision,Collusion and Organizational Design

We study the design of supervisory functions in an organization with one principal and two agents. Each agent can perform supervision activities regarding the other agent. We characterize the way the principal must structure incentive payments to avoid any collusive activity between agents. In particular, it is shown that better mutual information between agents may hurt the principal. The other main result is the possibility that it may be better to give up one supervisory function or to have a third party be the supervisor if possible. Finally, we show that such a dual supervisory structure raises the possibility that letting collusion happen may be the best policy.     

基于自然资本的经济增长可持续条件研究

主流经济增长理论对经济增长可持续条件的研究普遍忽视了自然资源的贡献。随着自然资本的耗竭 ,经济增长的决定因素将由人造资本转向自然资本。技术进步必须从节约人造资本转向节约自然资本 ,只有技术进步能够充分提高自然资本的生产率 ,经济增长才会持续下去。当技术进步提高自然资本生产率的机会已经耗尽时 ,经济增长将停止 ,进入稳态。     

论人文资源转化为经济资源的条件

人文资源转化为经济资源需要一系列条件。从外在条件来看,主要包括社会意识条件、生产力条件、资本条件、劳动力条件;从内在条件来看,主要有自身质量条件和开发收益成本比较。