Competition with Aftermarket Power When Consumers Are Heterogeneous

We study a model of competitive foremarkets and partly monopolized aftermarkets. We show that high aftermarket power prompts firms to engage in inefficiently aggressive below‐cost pricing in the foremarket. This inefficiency is driven by the presence of consumers with valuations below marginal cost. While for intermediate aftermarket power their presence leads to a competition‐softening effect, for high aftermarket power firms attract increasing numbers of unprofitable consumers by aggressively pricing below cost. For high aftermarket power, firms' equilibrium profits can therefore be decreasing in aftermarket power but are always higher than for low aftermarket power. If firms engage in price discrimination by bundling the foremarket and aftermarket goods or by reducing their aftermarket power, they avoid selling to unprofitable consumers but also reduce the competition‐softening effect. This decreases firms' equilibrium profits but increases consumer and social welfare.     

Selling to Socially Responsible Consumers: Competition and The Private Provision of Public Goods

We model firms as competing for socially responsible consumers by linking the provision of a public good (environmentally friendly or socially responsible activities) to sales of their private goods. In many cases, too little of the public good is provided, but under certain conditions, competition leads to excessive provision. Further, there is generally a trade-off between more efficient provision of the private and the public good. Our results indicate that the level of private provision of the public good varies inversely with the competitiveness of the private-good market and that the types of public goods provided are biased toward those for which consumers have high participation value.     

两竞争销售商在市场规模不确定条件下的预售策略研究

考虑两家竞争销售商与消费者市场规模不确定时,两销售商的最优预售决策问题。通过构建预售与不预售两种策略下两家竞争公司的收益模型,并对这两种策略展开对比研究,得出相应的最优预售价格与最优订购量。研究发现两个竞争销售商实施预售策略并不总是最优的,商品的单位成本会影响销售商预售的策略。当商品单位成本在一定范围内时,两个竞争销售商实施折价预售策略总是最优的,否则,两销售商应采用不实施预售策略。研究还表明,在竞争环境下两个销售商的预售价格折扣系数随成本的增加而增加,而且两公司博弈时预售价格折扣系数存在一组纳什均衡解。     

消费者网购过程中的学习行为实验研究

文章从人类学习行为的视角出发,采用实验的方法对消费者网购过程中的行为变化特征进行了分析。研究发现,网购消费者在购物过程中的学习行为总是驱使其去获得较高的收益,由于消费者都采取能够带来较高收益的行动,在一定情况下,网购消费者的行为会趋于一致;不同的网络购物环境会对消费者的学习效果带来不同的影响。该研究不仅给网络购物行为研究提出了新的探讨视角,研究结果还对商家制定网络营销策略具有指导意义。     

制造商向消费者提供价格补偿的分析

主要对制造商向消费者提供价格补偿的成本进行估计,采用定量分析的方法,建立具体的数学模型,分析所建模型的合理性,以及分析各参数对成本的影响,分析这种价格补偿机制同单纯降价相比的优越性以及这种价格补偿机制在市场中起作用的内在原因。最后表述如何在实际中灵活地应用这些模型。     

广告文案写作中的消费者分析

文章从主题的确定、诉求方式、语言风格的选择、购买决策者的判断、目标受众的确定以及传插媒体的选择和组合等几个角度,阐述了广告文案写作中消费者分析的重要性和分析方法.     

广告文案写作中的消费者分析

文章从主题的确定、诉求方式、语言风格的选择、购买决策者的判断、目标受众的确定以及传播媒体的选择和组合等几个角度，阐述了广告文案写作中消费者分析的重要性和分析方法。     

Tax Competition with Heterogeneous Firms

Abstract

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves a large country charging a higher tax than a small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an intensification of competition, a drop in Nash tax rates and a narrowing of the gap. Since large, productive firms are naturally more sensitive to tax differences in our model, large firms are the crux of tax competition in our model. This also means that tax competition has consequences for the average productivity of big and small nations' industries; by lowering tax rates, a small nation can attract high-productivity firms.     

Competing for Consumers with Self‐Control Problems

I examine strategic implications of competing for consumers with self‐control problems. For investment goods, like health clubs, I find that the equilibrium sign‐up (lump‐sum) fees decrease when competition intensifies, similarly to prices in standard oligopoly models. However, the equilibrium attendance (per‐unit) price increases due to firms' deteriorated ability to take advantage of consumers' self‐control problems. Moreover, firms earn less profit due to consumers' self‐control problems—the firms have a unilateral incentive to charge per‐unit fees lower than the marginal cost; however, they cannot make up the lost margins by increasing the lump‐sum fee, due to competition. I also show that for plausible parameter regions the market adjusts to consumers' self‐control problem in such a way that firms play the standard equilibrium strategies that they would have engaged in with fully rational consumers, with identical market outcomes. Most of the results are qualitatively the same for leisure goods (for example, credit cards); however, some results are reversed: the per‐unit fees are higher than marginal cost and decrease as competition intensifies.     

Carbon Offset Provision with Guilt‐Ridden Consumers

Carbon offsets allow consumers to mitigate their guilt associated with their carbon footprint. On the one hand, when offsets are purchased in an industry unrelated to the consumption activity, offsets are complements to consumption and the introduction of an offset market causes consumption to rise. On the other hand, when offsets are purchased in a related industry, consumption and offsets are substitutes and consumption falls. In general, however, net emissions decline. We find two exceptions to this rule. First, when offsets are purchased in an unrelated market, if there is no latent demand for offsets in their absence, the introduction of offsets can potentially cause a rise in net emissions when producers of “dirty” consumption goods have market power. Second, when offsets are purchased to fund green energy, emissions can rise if “dirty” producers can engage in pre‐emptive strategic commitments and the price of offsets is chosen endogenously.     

一类变库存费且存货影响销售率的EOQ模型

从实际背景出发,在变库存费和存货影响销售率条件下,分别就最小化平均费用和最大化平均利润讨论了具有Ramp型需求的变质性物品的EOQ模型,给出了无短缺量拖后和部分拖后条件下最佳订购批量的求解方案,数值例子对两个不同目标下的最佳订购批量及各项相关费用进行了比较,揭示了变库存费和存货影响销售率对最优订货策略的影响。     

Heterogeneous players in a Cournot model with differentiated products

In this article, we analyse a duopolistic Cournotian game with firms producing differentiated goods, marginal costs are constant and demand functions are microfounded. We consider firms adopting different decisional mechanisms which are based on a reduced degree of rationality. In particular, we assume that a firm adopts the local monopolistic approximation approach, while the rival adjusts its output level according to the gradient rule. We provide conditions for the stability of the Nash equilibrium and investigate some bifurcation scenarios as parameters vary. The main finding of the article is that both a high level and a low level in goods differentiation may have a destabilising role in the system.     

Estimation of Technical Inefficiencies with Heterogeneous Technologies

This paper considers the measurement of firm's specific (in)efficiency while allows for the possible heterogeneous technologies adopted by different firms. A flexible stochastic frontier model with random coefficients is proposed to distinguish technical inefficiency from technological differences across firms. Posterior inference of the model is made possible via the simulation-based approach, namely, Markov chain Monte Carlo method. The model is applied to a real data set which has also been considered in Christensen and Greene (1976), Greene (1990), Tsionas (2002), among others. Empirical results show that the regression coefficients can vary across firms, indicating the adoption of heterogeneous technologies by different firms. More importantly, we find that, without considering this possible heterogeneity, the inefficiency of firms can be over-estimated.     

Estimating Bayesian Decision Problems with Heterogeneous Expertise

We consider the recent novel two‐step estimator of Iaryczower and Shum (American Economic Review 2012; 102 : 202–237), who analyze voting decisions of US Supreme Court justices. Motivated by the underlying theoretical voting model, we suggest that where the data under consideration display variation in the common prior, estimates of the structural parameters based on their methodology should generally benefit from including interaction terms between individual and time covariates in the first stage whenever there is individual heterogeneity in expertise. We show numerically, via simulation and re‐estimation of the US Supreme Court data, that the first‐order interaction effects that appear in the theoretical model can have an important empirical implication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterogeneous impacts in PROGRESA

We investigate impact heterogeneity using data from the experimental evaluation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer program PROGRESA. We build upon, and extend Heckman, Smith and Clements [Heckman, J., Smith, J., Clements, N., 1997. Making the most out of programme evaluations and social experiments: Accounting for heterogeneity in programme impacts. Review of Economic Studies 64, 487–535] and recent studies of quantile treatment effects and random coefficient models. We find strong evidence of systematic (i.e. subgroup) variation in impacts in PROGRESA and modest evidence of heterogeneous impacts conditional on the systematic impacts. Our paper concludes with a discussion of the policy relevance of our findings and of heterogeneous impacts more generally.     

On Models with an Uncongestible Public Good and a Continuum of Consumers

This short note shows that models with an uncongestible or mildly congestible public good and a (non-atomic) continuum of consumers have an interesting but unfortunate property. Only an infinite level of public good provision in the continuum economy can be approximated by feasible public good levels in a sequence of economies with finite populations. We discuss the theoretical and practical problems this creates for familiar models that employ a continuum of consumers and a finite level of an uncongestible public good.     

德国卖车：华晨的“不归路”

祁玉民笑言，在中国有两句话，“你想痛苦就看足球，你想自加压力，就把中国车卖到德国去。我是做事关死后门、堵死后路的一个人，现在我们已经走到了一条‘不归的’路上了，我和华晨会把这种压力变成我们的一种责任。”     

在使馆区卖菜的“CEO”

王建平和她的家人经营着分布在北京使馆区里的11家连锁店,25年前,她还只是生活在河南农村的一名普通妇女     

Critical Values for Cointegration Tests in Heterogeneous Panels with Multiple Regressors

Asymptotic distributions and critical values are computed for several residual-based tests of the null of no cointegration in panels for the case of multiple regressors, including regressions with individual-specific fixed effects and time trends. The associated cointegrating vectors and the dynamics of the underlying error processes are permitted considerable heterogeneity across individual members of the panel.     

Heterogeneous beliefs in over-the-counter markets

The behavior and stability of over-the-counter markets is of central concern to regulators. Little is known, however, about how the structure of these markets determine their properties. In this paper we consider an over-the-counter market populated by boundedly rational heterogeneous traders in which the structure is represented by a network. Stability is found to decrease as the market becomes less well connected, however, the configuration of connections has a significant effect. The presence of hubs, such as those found in scale free networks increases stability and decreases volatility whilst small-world short-cut links have the opposite effect. Volatility in the fundamental value increases market volatility, however, volatility in the riskless asset returns has an ambiguous effect.