Translation homotheticity

Summary. The concept of translation homotheticity is introduced and defined. It is demonstrated that translation homotheticity is necessary and sufficient for: disposable surplus to be independent of the reference utility, Luenberger's compensating and equivalent benefits to be independent of the reference utility and always equal to one another, the risk premium to be independent of reference-level utility, absolute indexes of income inequality to be reference free, and social-welfare functionals to satisfy invariance with respect to the choice of a common origin. Translation homotheticity is also sufficient for Hicks' many-market consumer surplus measure to be a second-order approximation to disposable surplus, compensating benefit, and equivalent benefit. If preferences are translation homothetic and appropriately quadratic, Hicks, many-market consumer surplus measure is exact for these welfare measures. Received: October 24, 1996; revised version: March 3, 1997     

Welfare Effects of Foreign Direct Investment: Cost Saving vs. Signaling

We compare the effects of two types of foreign direct investment (FDI) (viz., FDI for trade cost saving and FDI for signaling foreign cost of production) on consumer surplus, profit of the host-country firm and host-country welfare. We show that the effects are dramatically different. If the reason for FDI is to save trade cost, FDI (compared to export) always makes the consumers better off and the host-country producer worse off, while the effect on host-country welfare is ambiguous. However, if the FDI is to signal the foreign cost of production, FDI (compared to export) always makes the host-country producer better off and increases host-country welfare, while it makes the consumers almost always worse off.     

Supply function competition in a mixed electric power market

In this paper, we present a mixed oligopoly model where electric power generators compete in supply functions in a liberalized market. A former monopolist, the state‐owned generator, is assumed to be (partially) privatized. First, we obtain that there is a relationship between privatization and the number of electric power generators concerning the level of consumer surplus and total welfare. Indeed, a fully state‐owned generator is socially optimal, lowering private generators' profits and enhancing consumer surplus; that is, if the degree of privatization decreases, consumer surplus increases compensating the damage imposed on generators' profits. Second, as the number of generators increases, full privatization may provide similar levels of consumer surplus and social welfare than those observed in a mixed oligopoly. Moreover, it is also obtained that price‐cost margins increase as marginal cost increases. Overall, our results suggest that the state‐owned generator should be privatized when entry barriers are low enough, and competitiveness is enhanced. Otherwise, a state‐owned generator may protect consumers, enhancing consumer surplus.     

The implicit welfare weights used when maximizing aggregate surplus

Aggregate consumer and producer surplus is a special type of social welfare function. In this paper, we investigate how individual welfare weights and how the social marginal utility of an increase in an individual's income behave if one uses aggregate surplus as a measure of social welfare. Our conclusion is that aggregate surplus is an ethically unacceptable measure of social welfare.I am grateful to B. De Borger and to an anonymous referee for helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this paper. Of course, all remaining errors are mine.     

Welfare gain from quality and price development in the Japan’s LCD TV market

We estimate the welfare gain from innovations in the LCD TVs that prevailed during the period 2005–2007 in Japan, via consumer surplus that we measure with the aid of discrete choice methods, using market data obtained from an internet price comparison service (Kakaku.com). Further, by the measured implicit values of attributes, we evaluate in monetary terms, the qualitative transition embedded in the attributes through the iso-consumer surplus planes. We thereby disaggregate the welfare gain into the qualitative and the budgetary components, which we call the quality gain, and the budget gain, respectively. The estimates show, along with the evolved process of innovation, that the quality gain was in the order of 381 KJPY, while the budget gain was 94 KJPY negative, which gives about 287 KJPY of overall welfare gain per consumer, during the period.     

A national-security argument for trade protection

This paper constructs a two-period model in which a domestic monopoly firm produces a good given an amount of import of the good. In the second period, the monopoly firm faces a capacity constraint with regard to its production level. The production level in the first period sets the maximum quantity for the second period. We investigate the effects of quotas on welfare to examine the economic rationale of the national-security argument for trade protection. Under decreasing marginal costs of a monopoly firm, tightening the import quota may increase the domestic consumer surplus and the social welfare.     

Are Larger Merger Synergies Bad News for Consumers? Endogenous Post‐Merger Internal Organization

In this paper, we endogenize the post‐merger internal organization of firms, considering two alternative structures: multidivisional, in which separate divisions are kept, and traditional, with cost synergies. We analyze when each structure occurs in equilibrium and how it affects welfare. We show that higher synergies do not necessarily lead to higher consumer surplus: firms can opt for a merger type that does not increase consumer surplus as much as the one that would occur with lower synergies. This highlights the importance of antitrust authorities basing their decisions not just on the magnitude of eventual synergies but also on the post‐merger organizational form.     

Revealed Preference Analysis of Characteristics Models

Characteristics models have been found to be useful in many areas of economics. However, their empirical implementation tends to rely heavily on functional form assumptions. In this paper we develop a revealed preference approach to characteristics models. We derive the necessary and sufficient empirical conditions under which data on the market behaviour of heterogeneous, price-taking consumers are non-parametrically consistent with the consumer characteristics model. Where these conditions hold, we show how information may be recovered on individual consumers' marginal valuations of product attributes. In some cases, marginal valuations are point identified, and in other cases, we can only recover bounds. Where the conditions fail, we highlight the role which the introduction of unobserved product attributes can play in rationalizing the data. We implement these ideas using consumer panel data on the Danish milk market.     

On Price Caps Under Uncertainty

This paper shows how standard arguments supporting the imposition of price caps break down in the presence of demand uncertainty. In particular, though in the deterministic case the introduction or lowering of a price cap (above marginal cost) results in increased production, increased total welfare, decreased prices, and increased consumer welfare, we show that all of the above comparative statics predictions fail for generic uncertain demand functions. For example, for price caps sufficiently close to marginal cost, a decrease in the price cap always leads to a decrease in production and total welfare under certain mild conditions. Under stronger regularity assumptions, all of the monotone comparative statics predictions from the deterministic case also do not hold for a generic uncertain demand if we restrict attention to price caps in an arbitrary fixed interval (as long as the price caps are binding for some values in that interval).     

Strategyproof sharing of submodular costs:budget balance versus efficiency

Summary. A service is produced for a set of agents. The service is binary, each agent either receives service or not, and the total cost of service is a submodular function of the set receiving service. We investigate strategyproof mechanisms that elicit individual willingness to pay, decide who is served, and then share the cost among them. If such a mechanism is budget balanced (covers cost exactly), it cannot be efficient (serve the surplus maximizing set of users) and vice-versa. We characterize the rich family of budget balanced and group strategyproof mechanisms and find that the mechanism associated with the Shapley value cost sharing formula is characterized by the property that its worst welfare loss is minimal. When we require efficiency rather than budget balance – the more common route in the literature – we find that there is a single Clarke-Groves mechanism that satisfies certain reasonable conditions: we call this the marginal cost pricing mechanism. We compare the size of the marginal cost pricing mechanism's worst budget surplus with the worst welfare loss of the Shapley value mechanism. Received: October 26, 1998; revised version: December 3, 1999     

Free Trade versus Autarky under Asymmetric Cournot Oligopoly

The paper compares free trade with autarky in an asymmetric multi‐country world under Cournot competition with constant returns to scale and linear demand. We derive respective conditions under which free trade will hurt a country's consumers, benefit its firms, induce it to export, increase its output and raise its welfare. We show that these conditions are linked in a clear order, with one implying the next. We further demonstrate that free trade can reduce world total output and total consumer surplus as well as world welfare. Along the way, we correct several oversights in the literature.     

Electricity Prices as Signals for the Evaluation of Reforms: An Empirical Analysis of Four European Countries

This paper looks at price trends as signals for the evaluation of utility reforms. A specific example is considered: electricity prices in four countries, namely France, Germany, Italy and UK. These countries offer a natural experiment in different patterns of public/private ownership and liberalisation of electricity industry. Electricity prices are mainly influenced by the mix of energy inputs, their costs, and by consumption per capita. Under different institutional settings, prices for business users are often more cost‐reflective than prices for residential users. Beyond these common features, the evidence does not support the view that there is clear dominance of one industry pattern in terms of welfare change for the representative consumer. This conclusion tends to question the widely held idea that one specific ‘orthodox’ reform should be preferred: privatisation with liberalisation and vertical disintegration. Utility reforms should be flexible and country‐specific.     

Information sharing about a demand shock

This paper examines two questions in asymmetric Cournot and Bertrand oligopoly with a demand shock. Under which conditions is information sharing a subgame-perfect equilibrium? What is the welfare effect when firms are better off? Given these questions, the normal assumptions in the earlier literature can be relaxed in three ways: demand functions can be asymmetric; a demand shock can affect firms differently; distributions of the demand shock and information signals can be arbitrary. Under these general assumptions, the answer to the first question is: every firm's response to the demand shock is stronger when all firms have perfect information than when one firm does so alone; the answer to the second question is: social welfare increases in Cournot competition, and consumer surplus decreases in Bertrand competition.     

Cooperative choice of corporate social responsibility in a bilateral monopoly model

This article presents an examination of a linear bilateral monopoly model with endogenous and cooperative choice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) level. This article also describes an investigation of the effects of cooperative choice of CSR on the market and welfare. New findings are explicit derivation of the necessary and sufficient condition for solving a double marginalization problem in the bilateral monopoly model with CSR. In addition, this report is the first demonstrating that cooperative CSR with Nash bargaining improves consumer surplus, social welfare and each firm’s profit to a level higher than that achieved through noncooperative CSR. Furthermore, cooperative CSR with Nash bargaining is shown to be capable of completely solving the double marginalization problem generated by a bilateral monopoly, although the manufacturer and the retailer are not vertically integrated.     

Parallel trade,product quality,and welfare

We study the welfare effects of parallel trade (PT) considering investment in quality. We thus revisit the case for PT in research-intensive industries. We find that PT may raise quality, depending on how preferences for quality differ across countries. Conditional on quality, consumer surplus may rise (fall) in the PT-source (PT-recipient) country. While PT reduces ex post welfare, improving quality is a necessary condition for PT to increase welfare ex ante.     

Do minimum quality standards bite in polluting industries?

We investigate the introduction of a minimum quality standard in a vertically differentiated duopoly where production is polluting. We examine the alternative frameworks with quality-dependent fixed or variable costs, under both price and quantity competition. Under Bertrand behaviour, the introduction of a binding MQS regulation reduces product differentiation, which causes an increase in the output and pollution. Hence its adoption must rely on the increase in consumer surplus generated by the increase in output and average quality. Conversely, in the Cournot setting, a binding MQS decreases output and pollution, and its adoption is driven by the fact that the balance between these effects and the associated increase in average quality yields a welfare improvement.     

Consumer surplus and the reform of network industries: a primer

Starting from an industry where production is provided by a public monopolist, we observe the effects of a sequence of reforms within the network industry on consumer surplus. Using a simple comparative statics framework, we find the indifference conditions for the consumer surplus under the following regimes: a public monopoly, an unregulated private monopoly, a regulated private monopoly, a vertically disintegrated monopoly, a duopoly and a liberalized market. The results are determined by the relative size of the x-inefficiencies of the public monopolist, allocative inefficiencies of the private monopoly, the cost of unbundling and the costs related to establishing a competitive market.     

Restrictions on Foreign Investments and the Relocation of Firms

We analyse why the Chinese government sets restrictions on foreign direct investment (FDI). We focus our analysis on the percentage of shares in relocated firms that the government allows to be foreign‐owned. The government's decision on this percentage depends on the entry cost, the number of firms that relocate and the weight of the consumer surplus in the objective function of the government. We show that by its choice of this percentage, the Chinese government may restrict or encourage FDI to its country. We also find that if the government may subsidise the fixed entry cost, it provides a subsidy only when the producer surplus has a greater weight than the consumer surplus in weighted welfare. In that case, the subsidy encourages relocation by both firms and permits the government to allow a lower percentage of shares to be foreign‐owned in relocated firms.     

WELFARE COST OF AN OIL IMPORT FEE

This paper examines the impacts on the US. oil market of a $5-per-barrel tariff on imported crude oil. The analysis shows that the United States currently is a price taker in the world oil market. This means that "optimal tariff" arguments for an oil import fee have no validity. The author also argues that any economic losses that oil supply disruptions generate are better addressed with alternative policy tools. To forecast the effects of the tariff on US. production, the author uses a domestic oil supply model that she developed elsewhere. She calculates the resulting gains in producer surplus and then combines them with an estimate of consumer surplus losses and government revenues so as to yield an estimate of the tariff's welfare cost. This welfare cost amounts to approximately $17 billion (in present-value terms) over the 1988–1998 period.     

The Optimality of Arbitrary Partial Equilibrium Welfare Analysis

This paper characterizes the general equilibrium foundation of arbitrary partial equilibrium welfare analysis in second‐best economies. While prior theory recognizes the importance of market distortions affected by relative price changes, it offers little guidance about the necessary scope of Marshallian partial equilibrium analysis. The paper determines necessary and sufficient conditions for optima of Marshallian total surplus functions to characterize second‐best Pareto‐optimal allocations. While these conditions confirm much of the traditional approach to applied welfare economics, they bring doubt about its reliability for public policy and concerns over its systematic use to build conventional economic wisdom.