基于互联互通与用户归属行为的平台定价与福利分析

在互联网即时聊天平台市场中,平台之间不能互联的问题导致越来越多的用户同时加入多个竞争平台,即多归属,以提高使用的便利性。但这种多归属给用户带来不便。针对此问题,本文分别从平台无互联与用户单归属、平台无互联与用户多归属和平台互联三个方面探讨了平台互联互通与用户归属行为对平台企业的定价、利润与社会福利等问题的影响,并对相关现象进行了解释。本研究认为,在依靠市场力量难以推动互联网即时聊天平台间实现互联的情况下,应通过政府干预来推动平台互联。     

反垄断法总则与双边市场理论的铆合适用--以互联网医药行业为例

互联网医药行业中,私人经济与公共利益交叉程度高,同时涉及经济垄断和行政垄断领域,部分适用通过市场机制配置资源的原则。其涉及市场机制的部分,可能会触动反垄断调查。医药实体行为或业务的性质,是界定该行为或业务是否适用市场机制的标准,同时也是判断《反垄断法》适用性的标准。互联网平台经济具有双边市场的特性,会在相关市场的界定和竞争分析的路径方面与传统医药行业案件不同。另一方面,并非所有医药行业与互联网平台的结合都适用双边市场理论,决定双边市场理论适用性的标准是医药实体与互联网平台之间的相互关系。在处理互联网医药行业垄断案件时,需正确区分两个关系:市场机制与非市场机制的关系、医药实体与互联网平台的关系。     

Economic Progress,Social Regress?

A central issue in the debate regarding the relevance of social capital is whether the decline in social embeddedness that has attended modernization over the last 40 years in the United States is as harmful as Putnam, among others, claim it to be. Critics of Putnam's thesis argue that various arms‐length institutions fulfil the roles performed by social capital thereby mitigating the negative impact of its recent decline. We develop a framework that provides insight into when such institutions may be adequate and when they might not. We find that if market (economic) and non‐market (social) interactions differ in their payoffs but are interlinked through the modernization of the economy, the optimal level of modernization in market interactions will be higher than that in non‐market interactions. Further, market supporting institutions are likely to increase the divergence between economic and social interactions since analogs for market institutions that constrain opportunistic behavior are usually nonexistent in social contexts. In this sense, economic progress may be accompanied by social regress.     

大数据信贷的“第三条道路”

目前,我国开展大数据信贷创新业务的主体主要有两大类:互联网公司和传统商业银行。互联网公司主要依赖自身电商平台或社交平台所积累的海量数据来获取用户信息。传统商业银行则利用自有账户或政府平台开放的数据信息自行搭建大数据平台,或通过与现有电商平台进行合作获取数据。但两种模式都存在一个共同的问题——可推广性较差。本文基于对中国最大的三家互联网银行——微众银行、网商银行和新网银行的一手调研资料,探索既不依靠自有互联网商业生态系统的数据,又不完全依赖自有账户或政府平台数据,适用于中小型商业银行的大数据信贷"第三条道路"。     

Tariff and Quota Equivalence in Vertically Related Markets

This paper re‐examines the issue of tariff and quota equivalence by introducing an upstream market into the Hwang and Mai (1988 ) model, and then allowing the two downstream firms to cross‐haul within each other's market. We assume the upstream monopolist can select either a two‐part or a one‐part tariff pricing strategy. It is found that if the upstream firm adopts a two‐part (one‐part) tariff pricing strategy, then the market price of the final good under a tariff will be higher (lower) than that under an equivalent quota; that is, the quota is set at the import level under the tariff regime. This result stands in stark contrast to the prior findings of both Hwang and Mai (1988 ) and Fung (1989 ). Moreover, if the quota rent is set as being equal to the tariff revenue, the social welfare under a tariff will necessarily be lower than that under an equivalent quota.     

中国互联网企业发展模式探析——以腾讯为例

目前腾讯已成长为一家业务涉及即时通信、电子商务、在线支付、搜索引擎、信息安全以及游戏、视频、社交网络、电信增值服务等多种业务的互联网综合服务提供商,市值超过350亿美元,是全球市值仅次于谷歌和亚马逊的互联网公司。研究腾讯公司从单一到多元化发展模式得出,腾讯的成功归于以即时通讯为核心业务,机会导向中迅速发展、营销策略的灵活性、战略性与前瞻性并驱。     

The diffusion of Internet telephony among consumers and firms: Current issues and future prospects

This paper analyses the current demand and market potential for Internet telephony—the transmission of voice over the public Internet or over a private Intranet—a technology that has attracted considerable attention as an appealing alternative to traditional telephony but that is likely to develop as a component within an integrated system of video, data and voice applications. The paper investigates technical, economic and social factors supporting and hindering the adoption of Internet telephony. In doing so, it relies upon the idea that the diffusion of Internet telephony is determined both by the attributes of the technological applications as perceived by the potential adopters, and by the characteristics of different users. According to this view, the research points out that relevant uncertainties reside on the demand side, particularly among residential users, and that in the future, businesses are more likely to adopt these applications than consumers. The assumptions concerning the future diffusion of Internet telephony are supported by the results of a survey carried out among a sample of Internet telephony service providers in Europe and North America.     

Internet Economics and Policy: An Australian Perspective

Publicly available information indicates that the demand and supply of Internet and Internet–related services are continuing to expand at a rapid pace. Since 1997 the number of Internet service providers (facilities–based and resellers) has increased by nearly 40 per cent; the number of points–of–presence per Internet service provider has increased by five times; the number of hosts connected to the Internet has more than quadrupled; and Internet traffic has increased from six to 10 times. The emergence of electronic commerce (e–commerce), driven by this rapid adoption of Internet services and continual technological innovation, is likely to have profound economic and social impacts on Australian society. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the impact of the Internet and e–commerce, ranging from the changes in the market structure of the telecommunications industry, its role in changing the organisation of traditional markets, the emergence of new markets, and the structural shifts to employment, productivity and trade. The paper also analyses contemporary Australian regulatory responses.     

Regular Distributive Efficiency and the Distributive Liberal Social Contract

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with nonpaternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto‐improving lump‐sum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract defined as a redistribution of initial endowments such that the resulting market equilibrium allocation is both: (i) a distributive optimum (i.e., is Pareto‐efficient relative to individual interdependent preferences) and (ii) unanimously weakly preferred to the initial market equilibrium. We elicit minimal conditions for meaningful social contract redistribution in this setup, namely, the weighted sums of individual interdependent utility functions, built from arbitrary positive weights, have suitable properties of nonsatiation and inequality aversion; individuals have diverging views on redistribution, in some suitable sense, at (inclusive) distributive optima; and the initial market equilibrium is not a distributive optimum. We show that the relative interior of the set of social contract allocations is then a simply connected smooth manifold of dimension n ? 1. We also show that the distributive liberal social contract rules out transfer paradoxes in Arrow–Debreu social systems. We show, finally, that the liberal social contract yields a norm of collective action for the optimal provision of any pure public good.     

Labor Mobility, Trade, and Social Capital

Labor market integration raises welfare in the absence of distortions. This paper examines labor and goods market integration in a general‐equilibrium model with social capital. The findings are: (i) labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare, and raises it if the goods and labor skills are sufficiently different; (ii) compared to Pareto optimum, labor mobility (social capital) is excessively large (depleted); (iii) trade is superior to labor market integration if trading costs are no higher than private migration costs, otherwise the outcome is ambiguous; and (iv) the creation of new institutions in response to labor market integration has an ambiguous impact on welfare.     

The potential for underinvestment in internet security: implications for regulatory policy

With the continuing growth of the use of the Internet for business purposes, the consequences of a possible cyber attack that could create a large scale outage of long time duration becomes a more and more serious economic issue. In this paper, we construct a game-theoretic model that addresses the economic motivations for investment in added Internet security and makes a case for a possible market failure in the form of underinvestment in the provision of Internet security. This result relies on the fact that the social value derived from consumption (which is at least equal to a fraction of the surplus derived from e-commerce) greatly exceeds the revenue at stake associated with the telecommunications companies’ and ISP’s security levels. If the ratio of social value to revenue at stake to Internet providers continues to grow, the likelihood of underinvestment in security becomes higher and some form of regulation may become necessary. We discuss the difficulties associated with designing and enforcing a regulatory scheme based upon mandatory security standards.      

MONOPOLISTIC LOCATION CHOICE IN A TWO‐SIDED HOTELLING MODEL

We analyse the optimal location choice of a monopolistic firm that operates two arbitrarily located platforms on a two‐sided market. By extending the traditional Hotelling framework, we show that the optimal platform locations are equivalent to the one‐sided benchmark if both sides are either restricted to single‐ or multi‐homing. In the mixed case (one side single‐homes, the other one multi‐homes), the optimal platform locations are in line with the respective symmetric case. If the monopolist is restricted to choosing the same location on either side of the market, the optimal locations are determined by the relative profitability of the market sides.     

Two-sided competition with vertical differentiation

This paper studies duopoly in which two-sided platforms compete in differentiated products in a two-sided market. Direct competition on both sides leads to results that depart from much of the current literature. Under some conditions the unique equilibrium in pure strategies can be computed. It features discounts on one side and muted differentiation as the cross-market externality intensifies competition. Less standard, that equilibrium fails to exist when the externality is too powerful (that side becomes too lucrative). A mixed-strategy equilibrium always exists and is characterized. These results are robust to variations in the extensive form. The model may find applications in the media, internet trading platforms, search engine competition, social media or even health insurance (HMO/PPO).     

Social heterogeneity and local bias in peer-to-peer lending – evidence from China

This paper investigates the presence of local bias in the peer-to-peer (P2P) lending market and explores the social heterogeneous factors that may affect the formulation of the investor's local bias. We find that local biases are commonly present among investors. Investors have a 9.3% higher probability and put 105% more money in lending to local borrowers. We also find that overinvesting in local loans is correlated with higher default risk, lower recovery rate, and lower realized return, suggesting the underperformance of these locally biased investors. By taking advantage of the diverse local culture and institutional features in China, we further show that social heterogeneity, including geography, language, and social trust, affects the degree of local biases in the P2P lending market. We propose two debiasing techniques from the P2P platforms’ perspective.     

An estimation of the future demand for portable Internet service in Korea

Portable Internet service (PIS), which refers to wireless Internet service that can be accessed via a portable terminal at every time and at any place, is scheduled to be launched in Korea in early 2006. Thus, both the government and the industry need to obtain quantitative information on the future demand for the service. This study attempts to estimate future demand for the PIS, to analyze the determinants of the demand, and to conduct pre-test-market evaluation of the service. To this end, the dichotomous choice contingent valuation method is employed. On the whole, respondents accepted the contingent market and were willing to contribute a significant amount, on average. This willingness varies according to individual characteristics. Finally, the study discusses the importance of including valuation method in a pre-test-market evaluation of the PIS and presents the implications of the results, such as the mean willingness to pay (WTP) and the effects of individual characteristics and concerns about the service on the WTP.     

Determinants of adoption of Internet in Africa: Case of 17 sub-Saharan countries

This study develops two-level hierarchical model that identifies factors that favor or hamper the use of Internet in Africa. We used data from a survey covering 17 African countries. Our results confirm that urbanization and the spread of Internet infrastructures play an important role in individual decisions to adopt this technology. They also reveal that an individual will have a larger probability to use Internet if he/she has at least completed primary education.Moreover, individual characteristics such as sex, age, level of education, and a social network membership greatly influence Internet adoption. Indeed, men are more likely to use Internet than women; this probability is larger if they are young (16–30 years old) or if they attained at least secondary education level or if they are members of a social network.     

To Trade Or Not To Trade: Economies With A Variable Number Of Tradeables*

We present a general equilibrium model that encompasses the endogenous selection and shadow‐pricing of a set of tradeable commodities, with home‐based and social production activities. In the model, a market system is a set of costly social institutions which embody the trade and production technologies available in the economy. Our equilibrium concept describes the pricing of market institutions, thus pricing the tradeability of a commodity. We obtain the existence and the decentralization of Pareto‐efficient allocations. We discuss an example regarding the transition of a guild‐based economy into a market‐based economy.     

COOPERATIVE MANAGERIAL DELEGATION,R&D AND COLLUSION

Existing literature on managerial delegation indicates that collusive outcomes can be obtained in an oligopoly game through cooperative managerial delegation. In contrast, this paper shows that, if managers are delegated to choose R&D, in addition to choosing production levels, full‐collusive outcomes cannot be achieved through cooperative delegation. Moreover, (i) under cooperative delegation, semi‐collusion always yields lower profit, higher R&D, higher price and lower social welfare than that in the case of competition and (ii) cooperative delegation leads to a higher profit lower R&D, higher price and lower social welfare than the no delegation case, irrespective of product market conduct.     

Social economy and employment – the case of Sweden

Recent research has shown growing shares of employment in the social economy (or non-profit sector) both in the European Union and in the United States. In the EU, there seems to be growing hopes that the social economy will be capable of contributing to local progress on the unemployment issue in crisis regions. This paper analyses employment in certain entrepreneurial forms, usually considered belonging to the social economy, in Sweden during the 1990s. The results show considerable regional differences of employment in the social economy, but also that its share of the labor market is very limited. The effect of social-economic organizations on employment, therefore, is probably mainly indirect in as much as they function as platforms for cooperation between firms or else as embryos for enterprises by strengthening local entrepreneurship and helping to nurture a deposit of social capital which has visible effects on private business and jobs. However, these effects need more detailed examinations.