Ethics,Welfare, and Markets: An Economic Analysis

The present article examines society's welfare when goods with identical physical attributes can be produced using two alternative technologies, one of them less ethically desirable but less expensive for at least some producers. For the scenario where identification costs must be borne by producers and consumers of the high‐quality good, the outcome under unregulated markets is identical to the optimal solution of a central planner constrained to neither ban the undesirable technology nor segregate the low‐quality good. However, under certain circumstances the unregulated market equilibrium may be improved upon by government intervention that shifts the burden of identification costs to the producers of the low‐quality good, or which bans the production of the low‐quality good. The optimal intervention needs to be determined case‐by‐case and depends on consumer preferences, relative production costs, and relative costs of identification and fraud prevention.     

Consumer Rationing and Cournot Outcomes: Experimental Evidence

We report the results of duopoly market experiments where firms first commit to capacities and then compete in prices. The theoretical literature pertaining to these duopoly models suggests that the way residual demand is rationed is fundamental to the character of equilibrium outcomes when capacity costs are sufficiently low. The experiments test this prediction by varying capacity cost and demand‐rationing schemes. We find that residual demand rationing does not significantly impact the capacity choices of experimental subjects, although it does affect pricing. Regardless of rationing scheme, the Cournot outcome is common with high capacity costs and rare with low capacity costs.     

Waiting for Signaling Quality

When a durable good of uncertain quality is introduced to the market, some consumers strategically delay their buying until the next period, with the hope of learning the unknown quality. I analyze the monopolist's pricing and waiting strategies when consumers have strategic delay incentives. I show when the monopolist offers introductory low prices in pooling equilibria. I also find two types of separating equilibria: one where the high‐type monopolist signals its quality by choosing a different price than the low‐type monopolist in the first period and another where the high‐type monopolist announces the product in the first period and waits to sell only in the second period. Waiting creates a credible cost for signaling; hence, the monopolist uses it as a signaling device.     

基于社会网络效应的多产品扩散竞争策略研究

产品扩散与竞争策略是营销管理研究重要领域。产品扩散过程受社会网络结构、产品质量、初始种子用户、竞争环境等多种因素影响,往往呈现出富者更富机制,形成流行产品。基于社会网络视角,采用多智能体仿真实验的方法,建立产品扩散模型,模拟分析产品扩散中富者更富机制的形成机理,以及产品质量策略与初始种子用户策略在市场竞争中的效果。通过仿真数据分析表明,产品质量策略在初始种子用户较低、采纳人数较少的情况下,具有较好的效果,而当产品采纳比例超过0.16,富者更富机制形成并表现出强大的正反馈效应,形成不可扭转的趋势。在多产品市场竞争中,则需要两种策略同时使用,从而能以较低的投入成本,达到良好的竞争效果。     

互联网平台垄断与低质量陷阱

坚定不移地走高质量发展道路,已经成为各领域发展的共识。然而,随着互联网平台经济的飞速发展,线上市场中的低质量问题也变得愈加突出,相比线下市场,线上市场同类产品不合格率、不达标率、投诉量更高。文章认为平台垄断是低质量陷阱产生的主要原因,超级互联网平台的价格垄断、流量垄断和渠道垄断行为,一方面形成了对低成本实体经济需求的"扩张效应",即低价垄断迫使实体企业降低产品质量成本;另一方面形成了对高质量产品的"挤出效应",即流量垄断带来的高额流量费用,迫使实体企业将大部分资金用于线上市场产品营销,挤出了质量创新投入和渠道垄断形成的巨大规模效应,迫使实体企业将低质低价产品打造成为爆款,保障线上市场销量优势。为此,政府部门需要加大对互联网平台恶性价格竞争的监管和处罚力度,督促互联网平台降低实体企业经营成本,强化互联网平台对实体企业的质量赋能作用。     

Exclusive Dealing through Resellers in Auctions with Stochastic Bidder Participation

This paper demonstrates that a seller prefers to exclude final consumers from an auction and sell only to resellers when these resellers can gain access, at a cost, to a sufficiently bigger market than the seller himself. The intuition is that resellers recoup their expenses for marketing the item by reselling it to final consumers. If some consumers participate in the first auction and are outbid by the resellers, then their values for the item are relatively low. Outbidding part of their customer base is “bad news” for the resellers, and this depresses their bids when consumers compete with them. The socially optimal and revenue-maximizing choices of auction format may not coincide: Restricting participation of consumers may be socially optimal but privately suboptimal and vice-versa. The results suggest that (i) the exclusion of final consumers in some auctions may not be driven by transaction cost considerations, and (ii) sellers should not necessarily sell directly to consumers, even though new technologies allow them to do so at essentially zero cost, unless they can access a sufficiently large portion of the market.     

Why We Should Stop Being Surprised that Lightly Regulated Markets Fall Short of the SEC's Goals for Market Quality: A Discussion of “Private Intermediary Innovation and Market Liquidity”

The stated goals of the SEC are to protect investors, maintain orderly markets and facilitate capital formation. These goals can be achieved with very light regulation if, as assumed by traditional economic theory, investors process information costlessly and protect themselves from informational disadvantages, and firms optimally balance the costs and benefits of committing to make their reports reliable. A growing body of research demonstrates that light regulation fails to achieve the SEC's goals, because investors find information processing costly and fail to protect themselves. After reviewing theory and prior evidence, I discuss new lessons learned from Jiang, Petroni, and Wang ( 2016 ), who show that Pink Sheets^® reduced the liquidity of firms with low reporting quality and increased the liquidity of firms with high reporting quality, merely by highlighting the quality of their listed firms’ disclosure. While the Pink Sheets^® innovation might have occurred through many causal channels, all of them entail a violation of costless processing and self‐protection, and lead to the conclusion that this lightly regulated market did not initially meet the stated goals of the SEC. I conclude by arguing that markets can achieve the SEC's goals only if they exhibit a particularly strong version of “dynamic” market efficiency, which requires that each individual trade on the path to even incomplete revelation occurs at the then‐optimal price. Because dynamic efficiency is unlikely, we should stop being surprised to see evidence that lightly regulated markets fall short on key dimensions. Instead, we should use our well‐developed understanding of market inefficiency to guide regulation.     

Commitment and Cost of Equity Capital: An Examination of Timely Balance Sheet Disclosure in Earnings Announcements

In this paper, I examine the relation between disclosure commitment and cost of equity capital using accelerated earnings announcement disclosures as a measure of commitment. In settings characterized by imperfect market competition, I find that firms which consistently disclose balance sheet detail in relatively timely earnings announcements have lower costs of capital compared to other firms. This result is statistically significant and economically meaningful, and is robust to various alternative measurements for cost of capital, and alternative designs addressing endogeneity and underlying information quality. Overall, this result is important because it highlights additional dimensions of disclosure commitment (consistency and timeliness), while incorporating important features from theoretical models (information quality and market competition). In particular, my results suggest that consistency and timeliness are salient features of firms' disclosure behavior that have predictable and robust relations with capital market outcomes. This result is robust to controlling for underlying information quality; however, consistent with theory, it is conditional on low levels of market competition.     

产品市场对寡头企业资本结构的影响——考虑破产成本的模型

从战略角度看,寡头企业的资本结构与产品市场密切相关,受到"有限责任效应"和破产成本效应的双重制约。企业对负债水平的选择实际是对这两种相互对立的制约因素的权衡。本文以一个典型的两阶段古诺博弈模型证明了,随着负债水平由低到高,企业的整体价值先升后降;在拐点处,企业实现了"最优资本结构"。     

Effectiveness of state-contingent monetary policy under a liquidity trap

Recent economic developments in Japan suggest that there is a growing interest in how monetary policy should be conducted under low inflation and nominal interest rates. In this paper, we first confirm the effectiveness of conventional wisdom against a liquidity trap, namely taking aggressive responses around the zero bound and variant of price level targeting so that it can intensify the policy duration effect, in the large scale dynamic general equilibrium model, the JEM (Japanese Economic Model). We then show that the optimal tangible policy rules around the zero bound are possibly state-contingent at the same time. J. Japanese Int. Economies 20 (3) (2006) 364–379.     

Sulawesi's Cocoa Boom: Lessons of Smallholder Dynamism and a Hands-Off Policy

The rapid expansion of cocoa production on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi over the last decade surprised the world, not least because it came mainly from smallholders This paper examines government policies that have affected the subsector, and identifies issues it faces. The study concludes that the following factors contributed to the expansion, the availability of suitable land; low production costs; a highly competitive marketing system (a result of the government s policy of limited intervention), relatively good transport infrastructure, favourable macroeconomic policies, and smallholder entrepreneurship. It is particularly important that Indonesia s government left cocoa marketing and distribution free of many of the interventions applied to other commodities. Because of the competitive marketing system, the farmgate price of cocoa in Indonesia is very high relative to the export price Issues that must be addressed if cocoa is to develop further include product quality, the ‘adding-up’ problem, pest control and VAT.     

Interbank market frictions, international banks and growth

In developing countries and countries in transition, a lack of finance is regarded as a major reason for the underperformance of the SME sector. The financial sector does not channel funds efficiently from savers to the most efficient investment. In a general equilibrium endogenous growth model, we explain the underperformance of the SME sector by interbank market frictions. High information costs in the interbank market lead to a high loan/deposit spread and hence to a low growth equilibrium. The solution to this problem is twofold. First, central bank policy could reduce interbank information problems by providing effective bank supervision. Second, if the central bank is expected not to have sufficient monitoring capabilities, reputation and reserves, opening up the interbank market to international banks can substitute for insufficient central bank activities.The sources of this advantage in efficiency are stronger incentives for workers and managers (direct connection between effort and return), easier monitoring and greater flexibility (McIntyre 2001).     

Optimal Monopolist Export Pricing with Dynamic Demand and Learning Curve Effects

This paper addresses incomplete exchange rate pass-through (ERPT) and pricing-to-market (PTM) by proposing an optimal control model of dynamic monopolistic pricing on a foreign market, which accounts for dynamic demand effects (such as diffusion or saturation) and learning curve effects. It is shown how the optimal dynamic export pricing results in partial or full ERPT in the long-term equilibrium. Moreover, transitional price dynamics are illustrated, which may explain dumping, i.e., temporary prices below unit costs, and (asymmetric) short-run overshooting dynamics of the optimal export price level as a reaction to exchange rate changes.     

国际知名家电企业海外营销策略对我国家电企业的启示

家电行业是我国改革开放后市场化程度最高的行业之一,是目前我国最具有国际竞争力的行业之一。加入世贸给我国家电企业带来了机遇和挑战,我国家电企业要尽快适应国际市场环境,大力拓展国际市场,积极创造世界品牌,做大做强中国家电业。本文通过对国际知名家电企业松下和三星的海外营销成功策略的研究,提出当前我国家电企业进行海外营销策略。     

The Discriminating Beta: Prices and Capacity with Correlated Demands

Uniform customer‐class pricing can do much of the work of congestion‐based or time‐of‐day pricing in communication or wireless networks. A monopolist exploits differences in the stochastic characteristics of demands. If demands are correlated and the firm faces a capacity constraint, then it can set prices to reduce the variability of aggregate demand, thereby reducing the probability of excess demand and the associated service quality deterioration. Demands that covary negatively with aggregate demand are valuable to the firm in much the same way that securities that covary negatively with the market are valuable in a stock portfolio. Customer classes that exhibit low covariance with aggregate demand realize lower optimal prices. Optimal capacity is also affected by these covariances. As long as demands are not perfectly positively correlated, expected costs of joint production are less than expected costs of serving demands separately.     

论我国保险业的营销策略

目前,我国保险市场正由卖方市场向买方市场转变,这带来了消费者行为和动机的较大变化,消费动机与行为更趋理性和实效。这些变化无疑对当前的保险营销提出了新的更高的要求。针对市场转型带来的消费行为的变化和金融一体化进程,传统保险营销模式中呈现出来的诸如顾客导向不明确,市场细分不充分,缺乏科学的营销策划、没有完整的市场营销战略等问题,难以适应我国加入世贸后竞争加剧的保险市场。为调整营销策略,对激发潜在保险需求,促进保险业健康发展,文章提出了满足客户个性需求的差异化营销策略、注重品牌营销策略、"人本化"的营销团队管理策略及立体式的多层次营销策略等措施。     

The Implicit Costs of Motherhood over the Lifecycle: Cross-Cohort Evidence from Administrative Longitudinal Data

It is well known that the explicit costs of raising a child have grown over the past several decades. Less well understood are the implicit costs of having a child, and how they have changed over time. In this article, we are the first to examine the evolution of the implicit costs of motherhood over the lifecycle and across generations using high quality administrative data. We estimate that the lifetime labor market income gap between mothers and women who never have children (never-mothers) decreases from around $350,000 to $280,000 between women born in the late 1940s and late 1960s. Gaps tend to increase monotonically over the lifecycle, and decrease monotonically between cohorts. Our evidence suggests that changes in the gaps are caused by changing labor force participation rates.     

论中国石化产品市场分析方法

文章论述了中国石化产品市场分析方法和市场的中国特色。分析方法分三个层面：供需分析、市场分析和竞争力分析。供需分析主要论述了供应和需求两个方面如何分析,重点讨论了需求的结构分析和供需分析的核心工具一供需平衡表的应用。市场分析分为宏观层面和微观层面。宏观层面论述了宏观经济、政府政策和行业趋势三个因素;微观层面讨论了新增产能、价格变化、替代品、营销模式和突发事件五个因素。竞争力分析从企业战略层面分析产品的竞争力,讨论了成本和技．术两个因素。最后探讨了中国石化产品市场有中国特色的三个特点：现货市场、国营特色和进口产品的两面性。     

我国风险投资IPO退出的制度优化：市场效率与法律规制

风险投资IPO退出市场结构均衡是该市场资源最优配置的必要条件。目前,IPO退出市场存在基础市场建构不完善,创业企业供给与投资者资本需求数量结构失衡,交易制度非效率以及IPO退出的境内外空间结构失衡等若干问题。为促进IPO退出市场有效发展,需要完善境内IPO退出发行准入制度和IPO退出交易制度,并进而构建纵横统一的IPO退出法律制度体系。