DOES BEHAVIOUR‐BASED PRICE DISCRIMINATION FOSTER FIRMS’ DIFFERENTIATION?

We study the impact of behaviour‐based price discrimination on the incentive of the firms to differentiate their products. We consider both ‘standard’ and ‘extreme’ behaviour‐based price discrimination: the latter always reduces the incentive to differentiate with respect to uniform pricing, while the former fosters differentiation if the consumers are sufficiently forward‐looking and/or the firms are sufficiently myopic.     

消费者寻求多样化与企业定价竞争

消费者寻求多样化的购买行为会对寡头企业之间的价格竞争和经济效率产生重要影响。文章研究发现,针对消费者寻求多样化的购买行为,企业会对忠诚的消费者给予价格优惠,而对新顾客索取高价;消费者寻求多样化购买行为弱化了企业两期价格竞争,导致"默契合谋";而以两期统一定价为基准的经济效率分析显示,歧视定价机制促进了企业间竞争,导致消费者剩余增加,企业利润减少。     

Bertrand versus Cournot competition in a downstream mixed oligopoly with foreign ownership

Focusing on foreign ownership in the private firm, we examine the Cournot-Bertrand comparison in a mixed oligopolistic market with vertical market structure. We have found that if public and private firms were charged with uniform price for their inputs, then Cournot-Bertrand ranking in market outcomes confirms those obtained by Ghosh and Mitra (2010). This implies that under uniform pricing in the upstream sector, the vertical market structure does not have substantial influences on Cournot-Bertrand ranking. However, if discriminatory pricing is adopted, firm's profits, output, and social welfare are often reversed to those obtained from uniform pricing in the upstream sector. Given the closeness of products, if the share of foreign ownership is sufficiently low, social welfare in Cournot competition can exceed that of Bertrand competition, contrasting with the standard welfare ranking that Bertrand welfare is strictly higher than Cournot. This implies that Cournot competition can be more socially desirable than Bertrand in mixed oligopoly with vertical market structure if discriminatory pricing scheme is adopted by foreign upstream monopolists.     

TURNPIKE PROPERTIES OF A MONEY‐IN‐THE‐UTILITY‐FUNCTION MODEL*

This study establishes the global stability of a long‐run stationary state in a money‐in‐the‐utility‐function model. The major finding is that the constant money supply rule results in a stable allocation and price system if consumers discount their future utilities sufficiently weakly. Nominal and real interest rates will be in the neighbourhood of the inverse of the consumers’ discount factor β^‐1.     

TALKING,SEARCHING, AND PRICING*

I study the implications of interpersonal communication for incentives for consumers to acquire information and firms’ pricing behavior. Firms market a homogeneous product and choose its price; consumers acquire price information at some cost to themselves. Also, each consumer accesses the information acquired by a sample of other consumers—interpersonal communication. An exogenous increase in the level of interpersonal communication decreases the information that consumers acquire, and, when search costs are low, firms price less aggressively. In an extension, consumers may choose to invest in interpersonal communication at some cost. A decrease in the costs of interpersonal communication decreases firms’ competition.     

Price Competition and Consumer Externalities in a Vertically Differentiated Duopoly with Information Disparities

In this paper, we extend the model of vertical product differentiation to consider information disparities about quality differences and their effects on price competition. If uninformed consumers overestimate vertical differentiation, asymmetric information is a source of market power and informed consumers exert positive externalities on high quality product purchasers and negative externalities on low quality product purchasers. Such a result is consistent with the fact that information undermines brand. If uninformed consumers are skeptical, adverse selection issues arise and market demands may be perfectly inelastic to prices. With elastic demands equilibrium prices may be either distorted downwards or reflect real quality if the share of informed consumers is suffciently high. Therefore, with skeptical consumers firms may want either to signal quality or subsidize information provision.     

Biased managers with network externalities

In network industry under Cournot and Bertrand competition, we examine a model when owners of firms hire biased managers who have incorrect market demand. Contrast to previous studies, we show that (i) regardless of the strength of network externalities when consumers form the responsive and passive expectations, owners realize strategic advantage by hiring biased managers to be more aggressive under Cournot and Bertrand competition, (ii) firms prefer facing passive expectations for the weak network externalities and vice versa for the strong network exteranlities under Bertrand and Cournot competition, (iii) if the network size is sufficiently large, then the prisoner's dilemma that firms hire aggressive managers no longer exists under both competition modes. As with no delegation case, we obtain the different rankings of firms' profit depending on both network externalities and forming of expectations under Cournot and Bertrand competition.     

Complementarity of willingness to pay and cost heterogeneity under vertical product differentiation: A welfare analysis

Due to the fact that a consumer’s willingness to pay differs between segments, many unregulated industries are price constrained, although the specific costs of market segments also differ. If the product quality is endogenously chosen, we find that third-degree price discrimination increases welfare if a sufficiently pronounced complementarity between the willingness to pay and variable cost heterogeneity is given. This is due to the fact that the monopolist’s incentive for employing a pronounced price dispersion strategy is directly influenced by the consumers’ willingness to pay for the quality of a product. With endogenous product quality, the paper shows that the standard welfare result of third-degree price discrimination compared to uniform monopoly pricing (e.g. that total welfare and consumer surplus both fall if total output does not rise) can be only reversed given the complementarity is sufficiently pronounced.     

Choosing price or quantity? The role of delegation and network externalities

We consider a differentiated duopoly and endogenise the firm choice of the strategy variable (price or quantity) to play on the product market in the presence of network externalities. We model this choice by assuming both competition between entrepreneurial (owner-managed) firms and competition between managerial firms in which market decisions are delegated from owners to revenue-concerned managers. While network externalities are shown not to alter the symmetric equilibrium quantity choice arising in the no-delegation case, sufficiently strong network effects allow us to eliminate the multiplicity of equilibria under delegation and lead to a unique equilibrium in which both firms choose price.     

Location choices and third‐degree spatial price discrimination

This paper studies how firms choose their product differentiation levels when they engage in third‐degree price discrimination in the following product market competition in a location‐price model. We show that firms will not choose to locate at the two endpoints if different consumer groups have similar sizes. Hence, the principle of maximum differentiation does not hold, resulting in a more intense product market price competition. Only if the size of one group of consumers is sufficiently larger than that of the other group, would firms make their products as differentiated as possible by choosing the two endpoints as their locations.     

Market share dynamics in a duopoly model with word-of-mouth communication

We analyze dynamic price competition in a homogeneous goods duopoly, where consumers exchange information via word-of-mouth communication. A fraction of consumers, who do not learn any new information, remain locked-in at their previous supplier in each period. We analyze Markov perfect equilibria in which firms use mixed pricing strategies. Market share dynamics are driven by the endogenous price dispersion. Depending on the parameters, we obtain different ‘classes’ of dynamics. When firms are impatient, there is a tendency towards equal market shares. When firms are patient, there are extended intervals of market dominance, interrupted by sudden changes in the leadership position.     

A note on dynamic monopoly pricing under consumption externalities

We analyze dynamic monopoly pricing under consumption externalities, focusing on pricing under negative externalities. We also attempt to generalize models in the previous literature, which encompass both negative and positive externalities, by incorporating a consumer’s discount factor for past sales as a parameter. Analyzing our model reveals oscillation as the optimal price path in the presence of negative externalities.     

Foreign direct investment,input prices,and host country welfare

This paper analyzes a multinational firm’s foreign direct investment decision, through either greenfield investment or cross‐border merger and acquisition, into a host country with an input monopoly that adopts either uniform pricing or discriminatory pricing. The optimal foreign entry mode could differ under each pricing policy. Under Cournot competition, firms’ technological gap and the initial local market structure are critical to the choice of foreign entry mode, whereas product substitutability is important under Bertrand competition. In the presence of foreign entry, this paper also examines the welfare effects of input price discrimination for the host country.     

Peak-load pricing in duopoly

In this paper, we consider peak-load pricing by duopolists that maximize profit (not social welfare). We compare price levels and profits across peak-load versus uniform pricing regimes. Our main result is that the introduction of peak-load pricing can plausibly reduce prices by making price competition more severe and thereby reducing profits. This result suggests that competing firms may engage in collusion by not committing to peak-load pricing. Therefore, from the regulator's perspective, it will be desirable to encourage firms to engage in peak-load pricing to intensify competition.     

Commitment to a strategy of uniform pricing in a two-period duopoly with switching costs

This paper studies decisions by firms of whether to attempt “behavior-based” price discrimination in markets with switching costs by using a two-period duopoly model. When both firms commit themselves to a pricing policy and consumers are “sophisticated” and have rational expectations, there is a dominant strategy equilibrium with both firms engaging in uniform pricing. Both firms are better off in the uniform pricing equilibrium, compared with the discriminatory equilibrium.      

Stakeholders’ relationships and product market competition

In this article, we study the relationships between main stakeholders (shareholders, consumers and employees) when firms are consumer oriented (CO) in the sense of caring about consumers’ interests in the objective function. We let these firms first bargain with labour union over their employees’ wages and then compete either in the quantity space (Cournot competition) or in the price space (Bertrand competition). Our model shows that taking care of the consumers’ interests when determining product market strategies may reverse the traditional ranking between Cournot and Bertrand equilibria. This implies that if shareholders in a CO firm can choose either a quantity or a price strategy, they will surprisingly choose the latter. Moreover, we show that the conflicting interests between main stakeholders are attenuated under Bertrand competition compared to Cournot competition.     

PLATFORM COMPETITION WITH ENDOGENOUS HOMING

We consider two-sided markets in which consumers and firms endogenously determine whether they single-home, multi-home, or exit the market. We find that the competitive bottleneck allocation in which consumers single-home and firms multi-home is always an equilibrium. In addition, we find equilibria with multi-homing and single-homing on each side of the market. However, unlike the standard pricing result where the side that multi-homes faces higher prices, we find that lower prices coincide with multi-homing: agents find multi-homing more attractive when faced with lower prices. We also show that endogenous homing can induce straddle pricing which deters price undercutting between platforms.     

Equilibrium in a simple price-location model

In a spatial model with endpoints we show that when consumers have downward sloping (rather than perfectly inelastic) demand, a price-location equilibrium (with price undercutting barred) exists if the market is sufficiently long relative to the number of firms.     

Influence of market-level and inter-firm differences in costs on product positioning and pricing

The objective of this article is to study the impact of differentiation and firm positioning on firm’s pricing decisions in a horizontally differentiated competitive market. We build a parsimonious game-theoretic model and analyse simultaneous entry of firms. The effect of differentiation is modelled as an additional cost incurred by both firms based on the degree of differentiation between the firms. The cost of positioning is modelled as a market level cost affecting both firms whereby firms incur a cost if they want to position themselves away from the centre of distribution of consumers. Our analysis provides some surprising results, explains some conflicting empirical observations documented in previous research and may also be useful for further empirical research in this area by providing sharper predictions about the impact of various types of costs on market outcomes. For example, we find that if the cost of positioning is sufficiently high, then a firm with lower cost of differentiation charges a higher price in equilibrium, even when no differences in exogenous costs exist. We also find that under some circumstances the cost disadvantaged firm can enjoy higher price-cost margins compared to the cost leader thereby suggesting that higher costs could be a blessing in disguise.     

Price and Quantity Competition in a Differentiated Duopoly With Network Compatibility Effects

We consider the efficiency of price and quantity competition in a network products market, where we observe product compatibility with network externalities (hereafter, network compatibility effects). In particular, if network compatibility effects between firms are sufficiently asymmetric, the Cournot equilibrium is more efficient than the Bertrand equilibrium in terms of larger consumer, producer and total surpluses. Then, we consider an endogenous choice of the strategic variables, price and quantity. If the degree of network compatibility effects of the rival firm is larger (smaller) than the degree of product substitutability, then choosing prices (quantities) is a dominant strategy for the firm. Thus, if the network compatibility effects of both firms are larger (smaller), the Bertrand (Cournot) equilibrium arises. Furthermore, if the network compatibility effects between the firms are sufficiently asymmetric, the firm with a larger (smaller) network compatibility effect than a certain level of product substitutability chooses quantities (prices). In this case, the Cournot–Bertrand equilibrium arises, which is less (more) efficient than the Cournot equilibrium in terms of consumer (producer) surplus.