Downstream Competition, Foreclosure, and Vertical Integration

This paper analyzes the effect of competition among downstream firms on an upstream firm's payoff and on its incentive to integrate vertically when firms in both segments negotiate optimal contracts. We argue that as downstream competition becomes more intense, the upstream firm obtains a larger share of a smaller downstream industry profit. The upstream firm may encourage downstream competition (even excessively) in response to high downstream bargaining power. The option of vertical integration may be a barrier to entry downstream and may trigger strategic horizontal spinoffs or mergers. We extend the analysis to upstream competition.     

Upstream Mergers,Downstream Competition,and R&D Investments

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why upstream firms merge, highlighting the role of R&D investments and their nature, as well as the role of downstream competition. We show that an upstream merger generates two distinct efficiency gains when downstream competition is not too strong and R&D investments are sufficiently generic: The merger increases R&D investments and decreases wholesale prices. We also show that upstream firms merge unless R&D investments are too specific and downstream competition is neither too weak nor too strong. When the merger materializes, the merger‐generated efficiencies pass on to consumers, and thus, consumers can be better off.     

供应链中上下游企业间讨价还价的博弈分析

运用鲁宾斯坦的讨价还价模型的思想,构造了供应链上下游企业间不完全信息轮流出价的讨价还价模型,求解模型并对所得结果进行分析,得出双方达成协议主要取决于双方的“谈判成本”及其关于对方价格的预期。     

下游市场存在竞争的企业集团转移定价研究

基于企业集团面临下游竞争，研究了企业集团的中间产品的转移定价问题。研究结果表明，集团的中间产品的转移价格大干中间产品的边际成本。与Hirshkifer提出的边际成本转移定价策略相比，本文提出的转移定价策略为优。     

Virginia's New Ban on Public Employee Bargaining: A Case Study of Unions, Business, and Political Competition

This article explores the reasons why the Virginia General Assembly passed a law prohibiting public employee bargaining some 16 years after the Virginia Supreme Court had clearly ruled that such bargaining was impermissible absent express statutory authority. The impetus for this legislation apparently was a series of actions by Governor L. Douglas Wilder's administration involving payroll deductions for state employees. The Virginia case is compared and contrasted to the findings of recent aggregate quantitative studies of the determinants of public sector labor relations legislation, illustrating the relative influence of organized business interests over those of labor.     

Asymmetric Information, Bargaining, and International Mergers

The formation of international mergers is examined in the presence of two kinds of asymmetric information, one when a local firm has private information on market size and the other when a foreign firm has private information on its technology. In each situation, parametric configurations are identified under which a merger offer may or may not be made. It also examines the kind of offer and the probability of its acceptance. The likelihood of a merger beingformed is also related to the basic market size, demand uncertainty, and cost uncertainty. Welfare effects of tax/subsidy policies by the host country are also analyzed.     

Political Bargaining: Bricks, Bluff and Blackmail

The market does not always work well but, argues Rosalind Levačić of the Open University, neither does its alternative – jostling for advantage by interest groups. She draws on a case study to demonstrate that the bluff and blackmail of political bargaining leads to results that should be examined as closely as market failure.     

Competition, Imperfect Competition, and Dynamic Market Processes

Abstract . Contrary to the conventional hypothesis, the structural elements on the supply side of free product markets are not stable. The variability in the structures of free markets is readily apparent in an appropriate analysis of the emergence, growth, and maturity of free product markets. In this analysis, supply-side entrepreneurship plays a prominent role—one which is only imputed to entrepreneurship in the conventional specification of market conditions. In order to correct this deficiency in the conventional specification, an alternative specification is summarized in which are treated explicitly the effects of entrepreneurial activity with respect to the discovery and development of economically feasible new products and processes and the choice of and variations in the quality characteristics of the products of individual firms. This indicates that firms can and do influence the stage of development—and hence the related size—of a market and their relative shares of it by new product and process development and the quality of their output. In this way entrepreneurial activity affects particular product market structures.     

Wages, Welfare Benefits and Migration

Differences in economic opportunities give rise to strong migration incentives, across regions within countries, and across countries. In this paper we focus on responses to differences in welfare benefits across States. We apply the model developed in Kennan and Walker (2008), which emphasizes that migration decisions are often reversed, and that many alternative locations must be considered. We model individual decisions to migrate as a job search problem. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and must determine the optimal sequence of moves before settling down. The model is sparsely parameterized. We estimate the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979). Our main finding is that income differences do help explain the migration decisions of young welfare-eligible women, but large differences in benefit levels provide surprisingly weak migration incentives.     

Location Choice and Contract Bargaining

We study how managerial bargaining power affects outcomes and payoffs in a Hotelling‐type duopoly framework with restricted and unrestricted locations. We show that bargaining power only affects the distribution of the surplus between owners and managers but does not affect the locations, prices, managerial incentives, and consumer welfare. This is in stark contrast to van Witteloostuijn et al. (2007) and related contributions where bargaining power has real effects. We argue that the difference between our irrelevance result and their findings originates from the fact that their approach seems to be based on a behavioral assumption and not on microeconomic principles of owner–manager bargaining. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bargaining through Approval

The paper considers two-person bargaining under Approval Voting. It first proves the existence of pure strategy equilibria. Then it shows that this bargaining method ensures that both players obtain at least their mean utility level in equilibrium. Finally it proves that, provided that the players are partially honest, the mechanism triggers sincerity and ensures that no alternative Pareto dominates the outcome of the game.     

Bargaining Over Housework

A bstract .   This paper investigates the limited increase in housework provided by husbands in response to higher earnings and labor force participation by their wives. An explanation is provided that integrates the time availability, relative resources, and gender ideology perspectives that traditionally have been used to explain housework decisions. The outcome is the result of a bargaining process in which two concerns are identified as limiting the response of primary wage earning spouses to the employment of secondary wage earning spouses. First, the secondary wage earners' employment may in part be motivated by a concern about the durability of their marriage rather than their family's welfare. Second, a balancing of the inconveniences and the net earnings of the additional employment may be viewed as making only a limited contribution to the family's welfare. Empirical results of an analysis of the individual household tasks imply that both gender ideology and the spouses' earnings are important in determining the hours that each spouse devotes to household tasks. When making decisions about the amount of housework to perform, both spouses respond to changes in relative earnings, but the response of husbands, who are usually the primary wage earners, is smaller than that of wives, who tend to be the secondary wage earners.     

Less State, More Welfare

The long-familiar notion that welfare can be supplied only by the state has confused 'social' thought and policy. Dr Dawson, a PhD in Philosophy at Keele University and now a teacher at a comprehensive school, argues on the contrary that the less the state supplies, the more welfare will emerge.     

Competition,regulation and bribery

Bribery of government officials is commonly used to obtain contracts in many foreign countries. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 (FCPA) made it illegal for US firms to pay bribes, even in the absence of regulation on the bribe-taking side of the transaction. Opponents of the law claimed it would put US firms at a competitive disadvantage relative to foreign suppliers who were not subject to the same regulation. This paper models the effects of two types of anti-bribery regulation. In general, regulation of bribe takers reduces the disciplinary effect of competition and is ineffective in deterring bribery unless the penalties exceed the gains. The impact of regulation of bribe payers (i.e. suppliers) depends on whether the law is applicable to all bribe payers, firms' costs and the existence of contract price constraints on the purchasing side of the transaction. The results lead to empirically testable hypotheses about US exports to bribery-prone countries.     

Broadcasting-Auctions, Competition and Policy

How efficient is the Government at regulating the radio spectrum? Dr Cento Velianovski argues that its current system of TV franchises should be replaced by auctions.     

Advertising Media Planning,Optimal Pricing,and Welfare

This paper analyzes optimal media planning strategies in a pricing‐advertising competition model where firms can use mass and specialized advertising. We find that although targeted advertising avoids the wasting of ads, firms might find it optimal to mix specialized advertising with the mass media. We also show that the characteristics of the specialized media available crucially affect the outcome of price competition between firms, which can range from a full fragmentation of the market into local monopolies to lower average prices (compared to the case where firms had only mass advertising available). Regarding welfare, we prove that although the use of specialized advertising can lower consumer surplus and drive a fragment of consumers out of the market, this advertising technology is welfare‐improving, and can be Pareto superior.     

Explaining Downstream Integration

We examine the downstream integration decision by businesses, deriving hypotheses from the transaction cost literature which are empirically tested for a sample of 1392 businesses operating in a wide spectrum of industries. Our results provide corroboration for each dimension of the transaction cost framework in explaining why firms might integrate their downstream business activities. Given the large cross-sectional sample, our results provide some evidence of the general validity of the transaction cost framework within the context of downstream integration.     

The Role of Upstream‐Downstream Competition on Bundling Decisions: Should Regulators Force Firms to Unbundle?

We develop an upstream–downstream model to analyze downstream firms' incentives to bundle. In our framework, the upstream firms are content providers (such as television stations) and the downstream firms are system operators (such as cable/satellite operators). We show that an a la carte regulation (i.e., a regulation that forces downstream firms to unbundle) leads to higher consumer surplus, if the unregulated equilibrium exhibits pure bundling (PB). Hence, our model predicts that in the television industry, which is mainly characterized by PB, an a la carte regulation will be beneficial for the consumers. If, on the other hand, the unregulated equilibrium is characterized by mixed bundling, then an a la carte regulation will increase consumer welfare provided that demand for multiple purchases is strong.