组织间权威对交易分配和投资积极性的影响

企业投资决策是事前行为,而交易分配事后才能明确,当企业无法控制交易分配时,其投资积极性会受影响。论文从独立决策、卖方控制和买方控制三方面分析了组织间权威在交易分配中的作用,认为在独立决策时,企业因事后交易的不确定性而存在投资不足;而在卖方控制或买方控制的情况下,拥有权威的一方存在投资过剩,不拥有权威的一方则投资积极性不足。因此,当一方的投资对于社会总收益创造更为重要时,应由其拥有权威。     

Decimalization,ETFs and futures pricing efficiency

This study investigates the impact of decimalization (penny pricing) on the arbitrage relationship between index exchange‐traded funds and E‐mini index futures. The empirical results reveal that subsequent to penny pricing, there is a significant fall in the mean ex ante arbitrage profit, especially in the cases with higher transaction costs. Using the ordinary least squares and quantile regressions to control for the influences of changes in other market characteristics, it is found that the overall pricing efficiency has deteriorated in the post‐decimalization period. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that, due to the lowered market depth and increased execution risks, the introduction of decimalization has in general resulted in weakening the ability and the willingness of arbitrageurs to initiate arbitrage trades, which subsequently leads to a reduction in the general efficiency of the cash/futures pricing system. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 29:157–178, 2009     

Trade‐related Job Loss,Wage Insurance and Externalities: An Ex Ante Efficiency Rationale for Wage Insurance

The extension of adjustment assistance to those who have suffered trade‐related job displacement is widely supported on both sides of the economics of globalisation debate. The form that such assistance should take, namely wage insurance, is also the subject of wide agreement. Nevertheless, the formal economic rationales offered for such a policy are varied, including political economy arguments, equity arguments and market failure/ex post efficiency arguments. This note proposes an ex ante efficiency‐based rationale for the provision of adjustment assistance in the specific form of wage insurance. Job displacement imposes pecuniary externalities on displaced workers, which, in a complete markets setting, induce only shifts along the ex ante Pareto‐efficient frontier. However, when markets are incomplete, pecuniary externalities become welfare‐relevant. Without the possibility of diversifying or hedging the risk of pecuniary external diseconomies of job displacement using contingent claims, welfare is reduced ex ante. Wage insurance – whether publicly underwritten, privately underwritten (as in Shiller's (2003 ) ‘livelihood insurance’), or supplied on a mixed public/private basis – completes the market for contingent claims, allowing workers to diversify or hedge the risk of trade‐related pecuniary external diseconomies. By facilitating risk sharing, wage insurance removes an impediment to ex ante Pareto efficiency. Moreover, wage insurance affects not only post‐displacement behaviour by increasing the incentive to reacquire employment quickly, but it also affects pre‐displacement consumption and investment behaviour, in particular, lowering the threshold at which workers will be willing to undertake irreversible investment in industry‐specific skills.     

Duration of sovereign debt renegotiation

In the period since 1990, sovereign debt renegotiations take an average of five years for bank loans but only one year for bonds. We provide an explanation for this finding by highlighting one key difference between bank loans and bonds: bank loans are rarely traded, while bonds are heavily traded on the secondary market. In our theory, the secondary market plays a crucial information revelation role in shortening renegotiations. Consider a dynamic bargaining game with incomplete information between a government and creditors. The creditors' reservation value is private information, and the government knows only its distribution. Delays in reaching agreements arise in equilibrium because the government uses costly delays to screen the creditors' reservation value. When the creditors trade on the secondary market, the market price conveys information about their reservation value, which lessens the information friction and reduces the renegotiation duration. We find that the secondary market tends to increase the renegotiation payoff of the government but decrease that of the creditors while increasing the total payoff. We then embed these renegotiation outcomes in a simple sovereign debt model to analyze the ex ante welfare implications. The secondary market has the potential to increase the government ex ante welfare when the information friction is severe.     

Factor Intensity,product switching,and productivity: Evidence from Chinese exporters

This paper analyzes how a firm's specialization in its core products after exporting affects its factor intensity and productivity. Using Chinese manufacturing firm data for the 1998–2007 period, we find that firms become less capital-intensive but more productive after exporting, compared to non-exporters that share similar ex ante characteristics. To rationalize these findings that contrast with existing studies, we develop a variant of the model by Bernard, Redding, and Schott (2010, 2011) to consider firms producing multiple products with varying capital intensity. The model predicts that when a firm in a labor-abundant country starts exporting, it specializes in its core competencies by allocating more resources to produce more labor-intensive products. Firm ex ante productivity is associated with a smaller decline in capital intensity after exporting. A sharper post-export decline in capital intensity is associated with a larger increase in measured total factor productivity. We find firm-level evidence supporting these predictions. Using transaction-level data for the 2000–2006 period, we show that Chinese new exporters add products that are less capital-intensive than their existing products and drop those that are more capital-intensive in subsequent years.     

Does Post‐ante Investment Experience Matter? Lessons from FDI in China

Ample efforts of FDI literature have researched on the motives and determinants of FDI flows based on ex‐ante conditions. Little has been studied with regard to the effects of post‐ante behaviour in determining future investment decisions. Post‐ante experience of FDI decisions with regard to foreign investors’ satisfaction or dissatisfaction and future profit expectations on recurrent decisions are critical. This paper, thus, attempts to investigate FDI in the context of an emerging market environment with emphasis on how environmental and institutional factors and the micro‐firm effects of how investors’ post‐ante views on profits expectations and investment experience would affect MNCs’ decisions on recurrent investment and firm relocation. Empirical results show that decisions in the short and long run were affected differently by the factors under study. Specifically, the short‐run decisions were more affected by profit expectations while the long run by post‐ante experience on investment satisfaction/dissatisfaction and environmental and institutional determinants.     

Pricing efficiency of the S&P 500 index market: Evidence from the Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts

Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts (SPDRs) are exchange traded securities representing a portfolio of S&P 500 stocks. They allow investors to track the spot portfolio and better engage in index arbitrage. We tested the impact of the introduction of SPDRs on the efficiency of the S&P 500 index market. Ex‐post pricing efficiency and ex‐ante arbitrage profit between SPDRs and futures were also examined. We found an improved efficiency in the S&P 500 index market after the start of SPDRs trading. Specifically, the frequency and length of lower boundary violations have declined since SPDRs began trading. This result is consistent with the hypothesis that SPDRs facilitate short arbitrage by simplifying the process of shorting the cash index against futures. Tests of pricing efficiency comparing SPDRs and futures suggested that index arbitrage using SPDRs as a substitute for program trading in general results in losses. Although short arbitrages earn a small profit on average, gains are statistically insignificant. A trade‐by‐trade investigation showed that prices are instantaneously corrected after the presence of mispricing signals, introducing substantial risk in arbitraging. Evidence in general supported pricing efficiency between SPDRs and the S&P 500 index futures—both ex‐post and ex‐ante. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 22:877–900, 2002     

Subsidies for FDI: Implications from a model with heterogeneous firms

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of subsidies to attract multinational corporations when firms are heterogeneous in their productivity levels. I show that the use of a small subsidy raises welfare in the FDI host country, with the consumption gains from attracting more multinationals exceeding the direct cost of funding the subsidy program through a tax on labor income. This welfare gain stems from a selection effect, whereby the subsidy induces only the most productive exporters to switch to servicing the host's market via FDI. I further show that for the same total subsidy bill, a subsidy to variable costs delivers a larger welfare gain than a subsidy to the fixed cost of conducting FDI, since a variable cost subsidy also raises the inefficiently low output levels stemming from each firm's markup pricing power.     

Tariffs, quality reversals and exit in vertically differentiated industries

In a vertically differentiated industry a domestic and a foreign firm first choose the quality of their goods and then compete in quantities, or prices, in the home market. We investigate the cases in which a tariff is chosen before, or after, the firms’ quality decision. These cases are referred to as the ex-ante and the ex-post game, respectively. Optimal ex-post tariffs are positive and ensure that the domestic firm always produces the high quality good. The optimal ex-ante tariff is prohibitive and welfare under domestic monopoly is lower than under ex-post tariffs, unless firms compete in prices and the domestic firm is high quality.     

Entry and Component Pricing in Regulated Markets

This paper discusses work on computable models of entry into regulated markets. Cournot, Stackelberg and Fringe entry are considered for the case where the incumbent operator‘s profitability is regulated and component pricing influences the desirability of entry. The simulation results illustrate that welfare optimal component pricing can be highly sensitive to model specification (behavioural assumptions about agents, the nature of competition, the extent of product differentiation etc.) and that no welfare ranking of simple component pricing rules (such as marginal cost, average cost, opportunity cost or efficient component price) exists. In addition, the welfare desirability of entry is seen to be sensitive to the choice of welfare benchmark for comparison     

Basic analytics of multilateral lending and surveillance

I analyse the role of multilateral financial institutions in a world of global capital markets assuming that they have an informational advantage over private lenders in the market for sovereign debt. I show that the adverse selection problem in this market may be solved through certification if the multilateral agency does not care too much about borrower country welfare. However, with lending the private information of the agency will be revealed whatever its weighting of borrower welfare vs. private lenders' profits. Multilateral lending on concessional terms also alleviates the moral hazard problem — that investment in creditworthy borrowers is reduced as private lenders seek to avoid ex post default by constraining credit.     

Unions, competition and international trade in general equilibrium

We develop a two-country, multi-sector model of oligopoly in which unionised and non-unionised sectors interact in general equilibrium. The model is used to study the impact of trade liberalisation, deunionisation and firm entry on wages in unionised and non-unionised sectors, and on welfare. We find that a shift from autarky to free trade increases non-union wages and welfare, whereas the effect on union wages is ambiguous. We also show that partial deunionisation leads to higher wages in both unionised and non-unionised sectors, but only increases welfare when the proportion of unionised sectors is sufficiently low. Finally, wages in non-unionised sectors necessarily increase with firm entry, while the response of union wages and welfare depends on the trade regime.     

Shareholder Engagement on Environmental,Social, and Governance Performance

We study behind-the-scenes investor activism promoting environmental, social, and governance (ESG) improvements by means of a proprietary dataset of a large international, socially responsible activist fund. We examine the activist’s target selection, forms of engagement, impact on ESG performance, drivers of success, and effects on the targets’ operations and value creation. Target firms are typically large and visible, perform well, and have high liquidity (stock turnover) and low ESG performance. Engagement induces ESG rating adjustments: firms with poor ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings increase after complying with the activist’s demands, whereas firms with high ex ante ESG ratings experience a ratings decrease following the revelation of their ESG problems. Activism that is focused on environmental and social issues is more likely to succeed if targets are ESG-sensitive (i.e., they have a strong ex ante ESG profile). Successful engagements boost targets’ sales. Risk-adjusted excess stock returns (with four-factor adjustment and relative to a matched sample of non-engaged firms) of successful engagements outperform those of unsuccessful engagements by 2.7%. Results are especially strong for firms with low ex ante ESG scores. Specifically, targeted firms in the lowest ex ante ESG quartile outperform matched peers by 7.5% in the year after the end of the engagement. Our results thus suggest that the activism regarding corporate social responsibility generally improves ESG practices and corporate sales and is profitable to the activist. Taken together, we provide direct evidence that ethical investing and strong financial performance, both from the activist’s and the targeted firm’s perspective, can go hand-in-hand together.

     

人工智能时代个性化定价行为的反垄断规制--从大数据杀熟展开

人工智能时代,数据规模显著扩张,算法能力持续优化。科技实力雄厚、市场力量强大的经营者凭借大数据与算法工具的紧密结合,收集和分析能够反映消费者特征和行为的相关信息,以无限接近消费者购买能力和支付意愿上限的方式对消费者实施个性化定价。个性化定价行为涉及对条件相同的交易相对人在交易价格上实施差别化待遇,可能构成反垄断法所禁止的价格歧视行为。但与以往反垄断实施重点关注的排他性价格歧视不同,个性化定价突出表现为直接针对终端消费者实施的剥削性价格歧视,且在具体情形下呈现出不同的限制竞争效果,引发消费者选择能力与选择范围的双重限制。鉴于此,个性化定价行为的反垄断规制需要准确识别涉案行为,综合判断竞争效果,慎重选择福利标准。对于同时降低消费者剩余和社会总福利的个性化定价行为,可认定其具有限制竞争效果且不具备正当理由,从而构成违法价格歧视;对于降低消费者剩余却提高社会总福利的个性化定价行为,如果选择消费者福利标准则可认定其构成违法价格歧视,如果选择社会总福利标准则可认定其具备正当理由;对于同时提高消费者剩余与社会总福利的个性化定价行为,因涉及消费者之间的剩余转移,对其竞争效果的评价仍待反垄断实施予以明确。     

Uniform pricing effect: The influence of uniform pricing on product value judgement and purchase intention

Uniform pricing, which is a pricing strategy that sets a unified price for all products in the store or all products in the same category, is becoming increasingly popular over the past decades. However, scarce attention has been paid to investigating its impact on consumer behaviour. This research investigates the influence of uniform pricing on product value judgements and purchase intentions. Four studies demonstrate that uniform pricing (vs. non-uniform pricing) could induce stronger promotion perception, which leads to more positive product value judgements and purchase intentions. Moreover, price sensitivity and product involvement moderate this effect, and this effect only exists for high price-sensitive consumers and low product involvement consumers.     

Third-Degree Price Discrimination, Consumption Externalities, and Market Opening

This study investigates the effects of monopolistic third-degree price discrimination on market opening in the presence of consumption externalities between separate markets. Assuming symmetric interdependent linear demands and constant marginal cost, we indicate the possibility that with negative externalities a monopolist can do better by closing the relatively small market from the social welfare viewpoint, while it prefers opening that market if price discrimination is feasible. This result contradicts the previous literature on third-degree price discrimination and market opening which asserts that, in the case of non-increasing marginal cost, price discrimination improves social welfare if it opens new markets that are closed under uniform pricing.     

个别化价格歧视的规制难题及其纾解——基于“禁止差别待遇”规则的分析

在互联网相关市场,商品定价模式由统一定价模式和群体化价格歧视模式逐渐转向个别化价格歧视模式,“禁止差别待遇”规则面临个别化价格歧视行为的挑战。首先,个别化价格歧视行为引发了价格歧视型共谋行为。“禁止差别待遇”规则应采用“信息交流”与“知悉规则”的双重标准审查此类特殊的共谋行为。其次,个别化价格歧视行为开始伪装为动态定价行为,“禁止差别待遇”规则应当引入“相当性”规则区分两类行为。最后,个别化价格歧视行为在损害部分消费者利益的同时增加了市场效率,相关经济分析标准难以判断个别化价格歧视行为正当性。“禁止差别待遇”规则应当在损害分析与效率分析的基础上引入正当性综合审查。     

Can Mergers to Monopoly,Price Fixing,and Market‐Division Agreements Raise Welfare?

Naked market division, price fixing agreements and mergers which result in dominant positions have long been opposed by the courts and the government because of the high likelihood that they will result in a reduction in output and an increase in price. We show that the opposite may be true if the market is characterized by marketing spillovers. When marketing investment is required to educate consumers about the general capabilities or qualities of a product, marketing efforts by one producer will benefit rival producers. A theoretical model of these types of markets shows that marketing spillovers can forestall entry altogether or force incumbent firms to engage in ‘limit marketing’ that leaves the market underserved from a welfare‐maximizing perspective. Under these circumstances, market output and social welfare are potentially raised not only through horizontal agreements among competitors, but also through cost‐raising strategies and commitments to predatory behavior by incumbent firms.     

Flying with a net,and without: Preventative devices and self-control

Excessive consumption of many vice goods (e.g., alcohol) has both possible immediate (e.g., a drunk-driving crash) and delayed (e.g., liver disease) negative consequences. This research models the consumption choices of a consumer population with heterogeneous impatience and varying degrees of sophistication in conjunction with both immediate and delayed consequences of excessive vice good consumption. We show that even when a preventative device (e.g., a designated driver) that could eliminate the immediate dangers is available for (almost) free, some consumers forgo it in order to try to use the immediate danger as a soft tool to regulate excessive consumption (e.g., “If I know I don't have a designated driver, then I won't drink too much.”). Surprisingly, this “flying without a net” is a successful strategy for some consumers, and we quantify when it is likely to be successful versus harmful. This counterintuitive result has many consequences; e.g., public policies that make the provision of preventative devices compulsory could increase consumer welfare under certain conditions but overall are not Pareto-improving. Likewise, advertising campaigns that exaggerate the likelihood of immediate dangers may be welfare decreasing despite their good intentions. In exploring the effect of our model on pricing of preventative device, we find that pricing is not monotonic in the probability of danger. We also show that consumer pessimism about self-regulation can induce consumers to experience a “boomerang effect” of overconsumption in the presence of a preventative device. Overall our research shows that the relationship between prevention and risk is not as simple as might be assumed in standard analyses and that marketers and public policymakers often need to consider the short-term and the long-term risks as well how prone the consumers are to temptation and how sophisticated they are in judging their temptation.     

The impact of parallel imports on investments in cost-reducing research and development

We develop a two-country model of endogenous investment in process innovation by a manufacturer facing competition from parallel imports (PI). We find that the distortions associated with PI inhibit innovation. However, the difference between the manufacturer's expected profits under successful and failed innovation is U-shaped in the cost of engaging in PI. Thus, the reduction in R&D investment depends on both legality of PI and transport costs. The reduction in innovation could harm global welfare, depending on whether the manufacturer was deterring PI with a high wholesale price. If so, banning such trade would raise expected welfare.