Oligopoly and Merger: A Simple Classroom Game

Professor Miller describes a game which has been used in intermediate price theory courses as well as in introductory classes. Two versions are presented—a duopoly and a six-firm market, both with undifferentiated product and a known market demand schedule. Students are also asked to make a monopoly of the six firms by forming a trust or holding company. Miller contends that the game is more stimulating than lectures aud suspects that it will result in longer retention.     

价格歧视下四种市场类型的消费者剩余

市场按垄断程度由高到低可以分为四种类型：完全垄断市场、寡头垄断市场、垄断竞争市场和完全竞争市场。在发生二度价格歧视的情形下,这四种市场的价格歧视程度的定量结果是一个值得研究的问题。在二度价格歧视下,用微分法研究了一个垄断厂商市场情形,用博弈论方法研究了n厂商市场情形的均衡总产量,均衡价格,均衡总收益,总收益增长率,消费者剩余,厂商占有的消费者剩余率。最后把各种市场情形的上述指标归纳为统一的公式并详细分析了其性质。     

Quality competition and entry: a media market case

In this paper, we study the optimal tax policy in a differential oligopoly game where the competing firms share the access to a productive renewable resource. We show that, in a Feedback Nash Equilibrium of the game, a linear Markov tax, imposed on the output, and specified as an affine function of the available resource stock, leads the competing firms to produce the socially optimal quantities over time, thus overcoming the dynamic interplay between the tragedy of the commons and the firms’ market power. The optimal tax turns out to be independent from the resource stock in a monopoly, and it cannot be defined in a duopoly.     

Nonconvexity,efficiency and equilibrium in exhaustible resource depletion

We consider the problem of efficiency and existence of a competitive equilibrium in exhaustible resource markets where extraction costs are nonconvex. Nonconvexity is shown to imply that (1) (efficient) extraction ceases to the left of the minimum efficient scale, i.e., where average costs exceed marginal costs; and (2) a competitive equilibrium does not exist. Introduction of a backstop technology (which induces a flat portion of the industry demand curve) restores both existence and efficiency, provided that the backstop price is sufficiently low. If firms face even a small amount of uncertainty regarding their rivals' stocks, a backstop technology is sufficient to restore existence of competitive equilibrium, even if the backstop price is very high. In this case, however, the competitive equilibrium is not efficient.     

Bertrand–Edgeworth Duopoly with Buyouts or First Refusal Contracts

In this game the players are firms involved in a Bertrand–Edgeworth duopoly market. Payoffs to the low priced firm depend only on the own price, whereas the payoff to the high priced firm depends on both its own price and the price of the opponent. The price of the opponent enters the payoff function of the high priced firm through buyout or a first refusal contract. Only when the total capacity in the market is less than the output in a monopoly situation, there is an equilibrium in pure strategies.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, D43, L12.     

Using Market Structure to Regulate a Vertically Integrated Monopolist

A natural monopolist whose cost is private information produces a good which is combined with another good that can be produced by the monopolist or by other firms. The agency that regulates the monopolist can impose any of several different market structures in the industry: integrated monopoly, vertical separation with free entry downstream, or liberalization downstream (both integrated and independent production). When several firms produce downstream, a Cournot quantity-setting game with free entry determines the market price. We derive the optimal contracts to offer the monopolist under all three market structures and examine the influence of downstream cost differences on access prices.We then study the optimal regulatory policy where the regulator can condition the downstream market structure on the monopolist's cost report to the regulator. The optimal regulatory policy awards a monopoly to a low-cost upstream firm, but requires free entry downstream if the monopolist reports high upstream costs. Thus, the choice of market structure is an additional tool to limit rent extraction by the monopolist. Simulation analysis reveals the possibility of significant welfare gains from this additional regulatory tool.     

寡占市场下的广告成因探究

依照微观经济学和产业组织理论,高度集中产业市场中的寡头厂商往往会在价格变量上形成暗中或默契的价格串谋,使产业市场处在一种“准完全垄断”的状态。广告是企业主要的非价格竞争变量之一,重复博弈的结果使得寡头厂商能够走出囚徒困境(放弃产品的广告宣传),而垄断利润的存在导致第三方潜在进入的威胁,在位寡头厂商必然会联合起来进行抵制,通过广告串谋提高市场进入壁垒。     

Market Power with Interdependent Demand: Sale of Emission Permits and Natural Gas from Russia

With implementation of the Kyoto Protocol, Russia will most likely be able to exert market power in the emission permit market. But, as Russia is also a big exporter of fossil fuels, the incentives to boost the permit price may be weak. However, a significant share of Russia’s fossil fuel exports is natural gas. If a high permit price boosts the demand for natural gas through substitution from more polluting fuels and thus increase gas profits, this may increase the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. Moreover, a large fossil fuel exporter may use its market position to influence the effective demand for permits. Hence, the relationship between permit income and fossil fuels exports runs in both directions. In this article, we explore the interdependence between the revenues from permit and fossil fuel exports both theoretically and numerically. A computable general equilibrium model suggests the fact that Russia as a big gas exporter has small effect on the incentives to exert monopoly power in the permit market. Moreover, Russia’s monopoly power in the permit market has a small, but non-negligible impact on the optimal level of Russian gas exports.     

Antidumping Regulations: Anti‐Competitive and Anti‐Export

In a Bertrand duopoly model, it is shown that an antidumping regulation can be strategically exploited by the home firm to reduce the degree of competition in the home market. The home firm commits not to export to the foreign market which gives the foreign firm a monopoly in its own market. As a result the foreign firm will increase its price allowing the home firm to increase its price and its profits. If the products are sufficiently close substitutes then the higher profits in the home market are large enough to compensate for the loss of profits on exports.     

Auction and the informed seller problem

A seller possessing private information about the quality of a good attempts to sell it through a second-price auction with announced reserve price. The choice of a reserve price transmits information to the buyers. We characterize the equilibria with monotone beliefs of the resulting signaling game and show that they lead to a reduced probability of selling the good compared to the symmetric information situation. We compare the unique separating equilibrium of this signaling game to the equilibrium of a screening game in which an uninformed monopoly broker chooses the trading mechanism. We show that the ex ante expected probability of trade may be larger with a monopoly broker, as well as the ex ante total expected surplus.     

房地产税、市场结构与房价

本文在住房流量模型的基础上,构建了一个购房者和开发商的住房市场局部均衡模型,考察了完全垄断和完全竞争情形下房地产税与房价之间的关系。结果表明,无论何种市场结构,提高房地产税均导致房价下降;住房市场垄断性越强,房价越高,房地产税对房价影响越大。笔者对1996-2008年中国33个大中城市数据的检验发现,市场结构对房价影响大于房地产税。房地产税增长率每增加1%,房价增长率将减少0.03%;勒纳指数每增加1%,房价增长率将增加0.16%。房地产税与市场结构相互作用将使房价上涨,但影响微不足道。因此,对住宅开征房地产税,将对房价上涨有一定限制作用,但不能有效抑制房价上涨,而增强住宅市场竞争性、降低开发商垄断具有显著效果。     

Takeovers and cooperatives: governance and stability in non-corporate firms

If consumers wholly or partially control a firm with market power they will charge less than the profit maximizing price. Starting at the usual monopoly price, a small price reduction will have a second order effect on profits but a first order effect on consumer surplus. Despite this desirable static result, it has been argued that cooperatives are vulnerable to take-over by outsiders who will run them as for-profit businesses. This paper studies takeovers of cooperatives. We argue that there will not be excessive takeovers of cooperatives due to the Grossman-Hart problem of free riding during takeovers.     

Intertemporal price cap regulation under uncertainty

This paper examines the intertemporal price cap regulation of a firm that has market power. Under uncertainty, the unconstrained firm 'waits longer' before investing or adding to capacity and as a corollary, enjoys higher prices over time than would be observed in an equivalent competitive industry. In the certainty case, the imposition of an inter-temporal price cap can be used to realise the competitive market solution; by contrast, under uncertainty, it cannot. Even if the price cap is optimally chosen, under uncertainty, the monopoly firm will generally (a) under-invest and (b) impose quantity rationing on its customers.     

Controlling monopoly power in a double-auction market experiment

There is robust evidence in the experimental economics literature showing that monopoly power is affected by trading institutions. In this paper, we study whether trading institutions themselves can shape agents' market behavior through the formation of anchors. We recreate experimentally five different double-auction market structures (perfect competition, perfect competition with quotas, cartel on price, cartel on price with quotas, and monopoly) in a within-subject design, varying the order of markets implementation. We investigate whether monopoly power endures the formation of price anchors emerged in previously implemented market structures. Results from our classroom experiments suggest that double-auction trading institutions succeed in preventing monopolists from exploiting their market power. Furthermore, the formation of price anchors in previously implemented markets negatively impacts on monopolists' power in later market structures.     

Dictator monopolies and essential goods: experimental evidence

Monopolists set prices and if the good is unessential this may place the consumer in an uncomfortable position. But if the good is essential the consumer faces a pay-to-live or -die choice. Dictator and ultimatum games are superficially similar in that one game offers the right of refusal, while the other does not. The dictator monopoly is, however, not a game, and behaviour could be radically different in the market environment versus game environment. We recast the dictator game as a dictator monopoly experiment and find that the fairness characteristic of the game evaporates quickly as rounds progress.     

PRODUCT QUALITY,REPUTATION, AND MARKET STRUCTURE*

In a repeated game in which firms simultaneously choose price and product quality, but quality is observed only after consumption takes place, equilibria exhibiting high quality may exist in oligopoly markets even when the low‐quality one is a unique equilibrium outcome in monopoly and competitive markets. Oligopolists can sustain high quality through the threat of both a loss of reputation and a breakdown in tacit collusion. While we abstract from other reasons that market structure might affect product quality, we show that the inverted‐U shaped relationship between feasible quality and market structure is robust to several generalizations of the model.     

Technical change and market structure

This paper investigates the ceteris-paribus effects of labor reducing technical progress on industry-wide employment under different market regimes. We distinguish between a contestable market, a monopoly, and a market with bounded supplier power. Under a constant wage rate, employment will not decrease only if the elasticity of demand on a contestable market exceeds one. The same thing holds for markets with bounded supplier power. Under a monopoly, price elasticity must even be more than three. Ceteris paribus we thus have to expect a higher probability of employment reduction under a monopoly than under other market regimes. Raising wages proportional to productivity leads to an employment reduction on stagnating markets with supplier power. Here a raise in wages without layoffs is only possible if the growth in demand is at least as high as the growth in productivity.The author is indebted to Alfred E. Ott, Sabine Böckem, Rolf Wiegert and Ulf Schiller for valuable comments. Of course, I take responsibility for all remaining errors.     

我国自然垄断行业的价格研究

自然垄断行业是一个特殊的行业,我国自然垄断行业的产品和服务价格明显偏高,效率低下,政府必须对其价格进行规制。然而,常用的价格规制方法也有一定的局限性。自然垄断行业的价格管理改革,需要通过市场机制、竞争机制以及政府有效的规制共同对其价格发挥作用。     

Does Auctioning of Entry Licences Induce Collusion? An Experimental Study

We use experiments to examine whether the auctioning of entry rights affects the behaviour of market entrants. Standard economic arguments suggest that the licence fee paid at the auction will not affect pricing since it constitutes a sunk cost. This argument is not uncontested though, and this paper puts it to an experimental test. Our results indicate that an auction of entry licences has a significant positive effect on average prices in oligopoly but not in monopoly. These results are consistent with the conjecture that entry fees induce players to take more risk in pursuit of higher expected profits. In oligopoly, entry fees increase the probability that the market entrants coordinate on a collusive price path. In monopoly, taking more risk does not make sense since average prices are already close to the profit-maximizing price.     

Effects of Transport Regulation on the Oil Market: Does Market Power Matter?

Instruments used to regulate the consumption of oil in the transport sector include fuel taxes, biofuel requirements, and fuel‐efficiency standards. However, the effects that these have on oil consumption and price vary. If market power is present in the oil market, the directions of change in consumption and price might contrast with those in a competitive market. As a result, the market structure affects not only the effectiveness of the policy instruments used to reduce oil consumption, but also the terms of trade and carbon leakage. In particular, reduced oil consumption, as a result of increased fuel‐efficiency standards, will unambiguously increase the price of oil under a monopoly.