Free in-network pricing as an entry-deterrence strategy

This paper analyzes the entry-deterring power of free in-network pricing with multiple incumbents. Free in-network pricing may deter entry since it creates network externality that intensifies competition. One may expect that a particular entry-deterrent strategy adopted by all incumbents would have more entry-deterring power than when it is adopted by some incumbents only. However, we show that when free-in network plan has entry-deterrence power with two incumbent firms, sometimes one incumbent offering free in-network plan may have more entry deterrence power than both firms offering free in-network plans. In other words, we find that an asymmetric adoption of entry-deterrence strategies by the incumbent firms may be the best for entry deterrence. This result highlights the importance of the strategic choice of the pricing plan as a function of not only the likelihood/cost of entry but also of the plan choices of other firms, and may partially explain the asymmetric strategies used by competing firms.     

Capacity Constrained Firms and Expansion Subsidies: Should Governments Avoid Generous Subsidies?

This paper examines entry deterrence and signaling when an incumbent firm experiences capacity constraints. Our results show that if the costs that constrained and unconstrained incumbents incur when expanding their facilities are substantially different, separating equilibria can be supported under large parameter values whereby information is perfectly transmitted to the entrant. If, in contrast, both types of incumbent face similar expansion costs, subsidies that reduce expansion costs can help move the industry from a pooling to a separating equilibrium with associated efficient entry. Nonetheless, our results demonstrate that if subsidies are very generous entry patterns remain unaffected, suggesting a potential disadvantage of policies that significantly reduce firms’ expansion costs.     

Flirting with the enemy: online competitor referral and entry-deterrence

Internet retailers often compete fiercely for consumers through expensive marketing efforts like search engine advertising, online coupons and a variety of special deals. Against this background, it is somewhat puzzling that many online retailers have recently begun referring their website visitors to their direct competitors. In this paper, using an analytical model, we examine this counterintuitive practice and posit that an entry deterrence motive can potentially explain this marketplace puzzle. Specifically, we develop a model where two incumbents compete for consumers” business while facing a potential entrant who is deciding whether to enter the market. In addition to setting the price, each incumbent firm could potentially display a referral link to its direct competitor. Our analysis reveals that when confronted with a potential entry, an incumbent may refer consumers to its competitor, intensifying the market competition that could result in shutting off the entrant. Furthermore, we show that when referral efficiency is exogenous, it is possible that in equilibrium only one incumbent refers its customers to competitor (i.e., one-way referral) or both incumbents refer their customers to each other (i.e, two-way referral). When referral efficiency is endogenous, the ex-ante symmetric incumbents may choose asymmetric referral efficiencies ex-post. We extend the model in a number of directions including making the entrant share endogenous and allowing incumbents to be asymmetric. Overall, our results indicate that firms may be motivated by entry deterrence to voluntarily refer consumers to their direct competitors even when they are paid nothing for the referral.     

Managerial Firms,Entry, and Switching Costs

Empirical evidence shows that switching costs are important in many industries. We analyze the welfare effects of entry into markets with switching costs when firms can be run by managers and the entrant may be partially foreign-owned. We find that with profit-maximizing firms, the welfare effect of entry depends crucially on the ownership of the entrant firm. We also show that entry is less likely with managerial firms than it is with profit-maximizing firms. In the latter case, entry always reduces welfare if the share of the entrant firm owned by foreign investors is high. However, with managerial firms, entry always increases welfare.     

中国市场进入障碍与经典理论相一致吗?

文章从中国迟缓进入者企业类别中抽选了204个有效样本,检验中国经济环境下进入障碍结构和各个构成类别的重要性.研究显示,中国经济环境主要由三种进入障碍构成,分别是资金、竞争和经营环境,集中反映了14种不利因素.另外,中国经济环境中不存在经典理论普遍认同的最重要的进入障碍--守成者的成本优势,同时发现中国最重要的进入障碍是守成者管理经验.     

Does FDI Spur Productivity,Knowledge Sourcing and Innovation by Incumbent Firms? Evidence from Manufacturing Industry in Estonia

Does FDI affect knowledge sourcing activities, innovation and productivity growth of domestic firms? This study employs firm‐level panel data from Estonia’s manufacturing sector to investigate different channels through which FDI affects domestic firms. Based on instrumental variables approach, I find no evidence of an effect of FDI entry on local incumbents’ short‐term productivity growth. However, there is positive association between the entry of FDI and the more direct measures of spillovers. FDI inflow to a sector is associated with more knowledge flows to domestic firms and increase in their innovation activities.     

Promoting the Entry of New Firms

Although in the beginning the entry in the market of new companies has a positive effect on production and employment, the results don't seem to be so obvious in the long term. On the one hand, the possibilities of survival of the new companies are very scarce, on the other, the new companies that survive expel the less efficient incumbents from the market. The results of the simulations show that the effects of the policies on the population of firms in the long term are quite small because the policies are strongly limited by the pressure that the new companies cause on the established ones. On the other hand, the policies favor on increase in productivity but in a different way depending on whether they favor the rotation or not.     

厂商合谋理论研究综述

厂商合谋理论是产业组织理论的重要组成部分,最近几十年,西方国家在这一领域积累了丰硕的研究成果。从厂商数量、生产能力约束、需求波动、信息交流、产品差异、最优价格政策、多市场合约、交叉持股、纵向限制以及厂商内部结构等影响合谋形成和维持的因素着手,对相关理论研究文献进行系统的回顾和梳理,有助于窥见合谋理论发展的全景。     

Collusion in Spatially Separated Markets with Quantity Competition

This paper develops the incentives to collude in a model with spatially separated markets and quantity setting firms. We find that increases in transportation costs stabilize the collusive agreement. We also show that, the higher the demand in both markets the less likely will collusion be sustained. Gross and Holahan (Int Econ Rev 44:299–312, 2003) use a similar model with price setting firms, we compare their results with ours to analyze the impact of the mode of competition on sustainability of collusion. Further we analyze the impact of collusion on social welfare and find that collusion may be welfare enhancing.     

The role of business subsidies in job creation of start-ups, gazelles and incumbents

This study contributes to the empirical literature concerning the role of business subsidies in job creation. Our empirical analysis, using an extensive firm-level data, suggests that the impact of business subsidies on employment growth differs more between high-growth start-ups and other firms than between start-ups and incumbents. On average, all subsidies relate positively to the contemporary employment growth for both start-ups and incumbents. Furthermore, after subsidy reception, the employment of both start-ups and older incumbents receiving employment or other subsidies grows more than that of non-subsidized firms. However, we find that business subsidies do not provide a significant additional boost to either contemporary or after-subsidy growth for young high-growth companies. There are apparently some other factors that promote growth in young high-growth firms; these factors help foster strong growth in many cases with or without subsidies.     

Entry of Small and Medium Enterprises and Economic Dynamism in Japan

In examining the evolution of small and medium enterprises in Japan in the postwar period, this paper shows that entry rates for new firms have declined sharply in the last quarter century or so, a trend observed across most sectors of the economy as well as across most firm-size categories. To explain this pattern, the paper investigates the determinants of entry in Japan. Among other factors, it finds that cost disadvantages owing to small scale and the shortage of technical resources are significant deterrents to entry. It also finds that the availability of government-directed credit deters entry which suggests that, in their current form, such credit programs protect incumbents. Among positive factors, it finds that subcontracting opportunities promote entry which suggests that the subcontracting system in Japan is open to newcomers and helps give them a foothold in the economy.     

Turbulence in growing and declining industries

Turbulence over the industry life cycle is examined for the case of Portugal using the lowest possible level of industry aggregation, thus allowing for the use of panel data to study the evolution of product markets. Replacement of exiting firms by subsequent entrants plays a primary role in generating turbulence in high growth markets, while displacement of incumbents by recent entrants is the main selection force in declining markets. As the industry life cycle progresses, trial-and-error entry and entry mistakes decrease, and turbulence subsides.     

ENTRY AND EXIT OF FIRMS AND UNDEREMPLOYMENT EQUILIBRIUM

This paper extends the standard Keynesian model of aggregate demand and supply allowing for imperfect competition, variable returns to scale, and entry and exit of firms. It distinguishes three phases of macroeconomic equilibria, stagnant, expansive and contractive, according to whether the number of firms is fixed or endogenously determined by the position of the aggregate demand curve. Using this model we show that a large shift in the aggregate demand affects the structure of the economy irreversibly and that the real wage or labor productivity may move procyclically rather than anticyclically. We also elucidate the asymmetric effects of fiscal and monetary policies on the entry of firms and employment.     

Who should practice price discrimination using rebates in an asymmetric duopoly?

Price discrimination is generally thought to improve firm profits by allowing firms to extract more consumer surplus. In competition, however, price discrimination may also be costly to the firm because restrictive incentive compatibility conditions may allow the competing firm to gain market share at the discriminating firm’s expense. Therefore, with asymmetric competition, it may be the case that one firm would let the other firm assume the burden of price discrimination. We investigate optimal segmentation in a market with two asymmetric firms and two heterogeneous consumer segments that differ in the importance of price and product attributes. In particular, we investigate second-degree price discrimination under competition with explicit incentive compatibility constraints thus extending prior work in marketing and economics. Focusing on the managerial implications, we explore whether it would be profitable for either or both firms to pursue a segmentation strategy using rebates as a mechanism. We identify conditions under which one or both firms would want to pursue such segmentation. We find that segmentation lessens competition for the less price-sensitive consumer segment and that this results in higher profits to both firms. A key to understanding this result is that segmentation leads to consumer remixing. We establish the key result that if firms are asymmetric in their attractiveness to consumers, the disadvantaged firm in our model is more likely to pursue a segmentation strategy than its rival in equilibrium. We then ask whether this result prevails in practice. To this end, we explore competitive segmentation empirically and are able to verify that disadvantaged firms indeed pursue segmentation through rebates with greater likelihood.     

Conscious Parallelism in Asymmetric Oligopoly

Conscious parallelism refers to collusive forms of parallel pricing in oligopoly. In this paper, four distinct pricing methods which all impose some form of parallel conduct are analysed. The pricing methods maximize joint profits if, and only if, firms are symmetric. With asymmetries in cost, total gains from collusion are reduced and absolute and relative collusive gains differ between firms. For many collusive optima, low‐cost firms have only little to gain from conscious parallelism. This is particularly the case when the degree of product homogeneity is high.     

The ICT revolution in consumer product markets

New information and communication technology (ICT) makes consumers better informed about available products, product quality and prices, which mitigates problems of asymmetric information. The entry of firms is facilitated, competition and economic efficiency is boosted and the market powers of households increased. Firms are likely to respond by increased product and price differentiation. There will also be considerable changes in the division of tasks between firms and households. But important obstacles to these developments are technological vulnerability, quality problems in the information on the Internet, cognitive limitations of individuals and weaknesses in the product‐delivery infrastructure in connection with Internet trade.     

Colluding on a Price Increase

Adopting a general spatial framework, we analyse collusion concerning a price increase between two firms. We find that any variable affects the sustainability of collusion in the same way it affects the competitive profits.     

Firm Turnover and Productivity Growth in Canadian Manufacturing and Services Industries, 2000 to 2007

This paper examines the differences and similarities in the nature of the competitive process for a cross section of Canadian industries. It studies the intensity and the effectiveness of entry, the relationship between turnover within incumbents and the intensity of entry, and the failure process underlying the exit of entrants. Finally, it asks how differences in these processes relate to the contribution that turnover makes to productivity growth. Differences across industries both in the effectiveness of the entry process and the contribution of turnover to productivity growth are related to the conditions that permit entry at relatively large scale and regulatory conditions in the industry. Industries where entrants are capable of establishing a relatively large footprint are generally those where entrants capture more of the market, where there is more intense turnover among incumbents and where a larger proportion of productivity growth comes from turnover due to both entry and exit and changes in the market position of incumbents. Industries where regulation attenuates freedom of entry have a different though related profile. Even here, turnover contributes to productivity growth.     

Institutional quality and market selection in the transition to market economy

This paper investigates the impact of institutional quality on the productivity, profitability and survival of new entrants versus those of incumbent firms in a transitional setting, Vietnam. By integrating economic and institutional perspectives, we emphasize the importance of institutional quality in shaping the evolution of industry dynamics. We find that poor institutional quality that acts as institutional buffering for incumbents jeopardizes the Schumpeterian market selection process. In particular, despite being more productive and profitable, new entrants are still more likely to exit than incumbents on average. As a consequence, facing poor institutions, only new entrants with sufficiently high productivity and profitability are able to survive. However, improving institutional quality does not enhance new entrants' survival and entrepreneurial performance; rather, it removes the survival advantage of incumbents and thus reduces the differences in performance and exit hazard between new entrants and incumbents. We investigate this seemingly paradoxical relationship using Vietnamese census data from 2006 to 2013.     

Strategic Trade Policies Under Monopsony and Uncertainty: The Exporter’s Non-Linear Responses Based on the Organization of Its Industry

Players’ access to information, their market power, and the timing and rationale of their decisions are important but often neglected in the making of strategic trade policies. I examine optimal decisions in a monopsonistic market with asymmetric information to determine an exporting country’s policy strategies. The large importing country first sets a producer subsidy and later imposes an import tariff after learning about the welfare-maximizing exporter’s reactions to the subsidy. I assume that at the time of their decisions, the n exporting firms have incomplete information and rely only on noisy signals from their own domestic market to account for the uncertainty in the international market. I find that import tariff and producer subsidy can be substitute rather than exclusively independent policies. Results also show that the exporting country’s optimal reaction is non-linear and is based on the structure of its export industry; the exporting country’s government facing a large importer subsidizes (or taxes) its export when the number of exporting firms is low (or high) relative to a threshold number of firms. More important, before giving out subsidies, the exporting country’s government requires more collusion of its firms especially when the large importer targets a fixed domestic price.