Random capital service in labor-managed and profit-maximizing firms

The labor-managed firm and the profit-maximizing firm may experience random production due to a variety of fundamental sources of uncertainty. This paper demonstrates that the nature of the source of uncertainty leads to alternative specifications of the problem and to different conclusions. The specific source of uncertainty modeled in this presentation is random capital failure in the labor-managed firm and in the profit-maximizing firm. In each case, the choice of primary capital, reserve capital, and labor is considered.     

Quality choice under labor-management

The theory of quality choice and the profit-maximizing firm is rather well-developed. The theory of quality choice and the labor-managed firm remains largely unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to develop a quality choice model that leads to (1) comparisons between the labor-managed firm and the profit-maximizing firm, and (2) the effect of market structure per se on the quality choice of the labor-managed firm.     

On the economic theory of the labor-managed firm in the short run

This paper proposes a short-run utility-maximizing theory of the labor-managed firm (LMF), and shows how four previous theories can be derived from it. It is argued that one of the models, by Horvat, should be viewed as a type of satisficing theory for the LMF. In contrast to the theory of the conventional capitalist firm, it is the satisficing variant that provides efficient resource allocation. This paper also shows why comparative-static analysis may not be as accurate a predictor of short-run behavior of the LMF as it is for the profit-maximizing firm. Consideration is given to microeconomic policy in a socialist labor-managed economy.     

Socially responsible firms and endogenous choice of strategic incentives

In this paper we are analyzing a mixed quantity-setting duopoly consisting of a socially concerned firm and a profit-maximizing firm. The socially concerned firm considers one group of stakeholders in its objective function and maximizes its profit plus a share of consumer surplus. Both firms have the option to hire a manager who determines the production quantity on behalf of the firm's owner. We find that in the subgame-perfect equilibrium of this game both firms hire a manager and delegate the production choice. If the unit production costs of the firms are similar, then the socially concerned firm has a higher market share and even higher profit. Interestingly, we observe that the relationship between the share of consumer surplus taken into account by the socially concerned firm and its profit is non-monotonic. As the share increases, the socially concerned firm's profit first increases and then decreases. The conclusion is that it pays off to take stakeholder interests into account, but not too much.     

Incentive compatibility and the quantity-setting competitive firm under demand uncertainty

This paper examines the tie between the popular black box neoclassical quantity-setting firm under demand uncertainty and a firm with a rudimentary but explicit employee relation organizational structure in which workers are offered fixed wages for following management directives. Surprisingly, the quantity-setting firm unambiguously mimics optimal employment relation hiring and work rules when the contract is incentive-compatible ex post. The attitude toward risk is shown to be the key determinant of whether or not the quantity-setting firm replicates the optimal employment relation contract when ex post incentive-compatibility is relaxed.     

Dynamic limit pricing and internal finance

This paper examines a model of dynamic limit pricing with a profit-maximizing fringe constrained to finance new investment from internal finance. In a differential game, the dominant firm controls price, thereby determining the current earnings of the fringe, while the fringe chooses its optimal retention ratio. If market growth is less than the discount rate, an important feature of the solution is that price must eventually drop to the fringe long-run cost of production. If market growth is initially rapid, the dominant firm is much more aggressive in limiting fringe growth.     

HOW MANY FIRMS BECOME LEADERS?*

This paper investigates a quantity-setting oligopoly model with endogenous timing. We formulate an n-firm two-period model. Each firm chooses whether to take its action in period 1 or take its action in period 2 after observing the first-period actions of other firms. We call firms taking their actions in period 1 ‘leaders’ and those taking action in period 2 ‘following’. We find that the number of followers is at most one regardless of whether leaders have first mover advantage.     

The Labor-Managed Firm: Permanent or Start-Up Subsidies?

We explore a new argument that seeks to explain the near absence of the labor-managed firm or cooperative, despite a range of inefficiencies attributed to the present-day capitalist firm. We derive the crucial condition for the emergence of labor-managed firms and show that it is unduly restrictive from an efficiency point of view. The policy implication is that public intervention to promote labor-managed firms should primarily be in the form of start-up subsidies rather than in providing permanent tax subsidies.     

Corporate social responsibility and marketing channel coordination

We analyze a simple linear demand bilateral monopoly situation where one of the firms, either the up-stream manufacturer or the down-stream retailer, is socially concerned in terms of its desire to enhance its end-customers’ welfare in addition to the traditional profit motive. Two cases are explored: the up-stream producer exhibits corporate social responsibility (CSR) in one case and the down-stream retailer in the other. In the two-stage game, the retailer makes their quantity-setting decision in stage-two, given the two-part tariff (wholesale price and fixed franchise fee) set by the stage-one producer. In this setting, among other things, we find that the optimal channel-coordinating tariff is very different from the standard pure profit-maximizing two-part tariff. For example, if either firm in the supply/marketing chain exhibits CSR, we show the optimal wholesale price does not equal the manufacturer’s marginal production cost, nor does the fixed fee equal the monopoly profit earned by the retailer. Finally, we find that our two-part tariff CSR model provides a theoretical rationale for the empirical finding of little to no correlation between CSR and firm profits.     

Transfer prices in decentralized self-managed enterprises

This article examines the effect of transfer prices on the allocation of resources in a labor-managed socialist economy. If enterprises are truly decentralized, transfer prices do play an important role in determining the efficiency of the system. The proper transfer price for services performed by one division at the request of another can correct the misallocation that arises when the labor-managed socialist firm decentralizes. Nonlabor inputs are also examined. The conclusion is that the efficiency loss in a labor-managed socialist enterprise is likely to be less than the loss caused by the same nonoptimal transfer price in a capitalist firm.     

Short-run efficiency in the labor-managed firm

This paper examines the short-run comparative statics of resource allocation in a labor-managed firm when workers are free to adjust work hours but not membership in a competitive market environment. It is found that the workers might encounter difficulties in attaining their utility-maximizing choices of work hours, but with the acceptance of a simple collective-choice decision rule, each worker's optimum becomes the Pareto-optimum.     

WAGE‐RISE CONTRACT AND QUANTITY COMPETITION WITH PROFIT‐MAXIMIZING AND LABOUR‐MANAGED FIRMS

This paper examines the behaviours of a profit‐maximizing firm and a labour‐managed profit‐per‐worker‐maximizing firm in a two‐stage quantity‐setting model with a wage‐rise contract as a strategic commitment. The paper then shows that there exists a unique equilibrium that coincides with the Stackelberg solution where the profit‐maximizing firm is the leader and the labour‐managed firm is the follower.     

Strategic managerial incentives in a two-period Cournot duopoly

This paper examines the nature of optimal managerial incentives in the context of a duopoly marked by competition between the firm's managers in a dynamic production environment. If the marginal cost of production falls moderately over time or remains unchanged, there exists an equilibrium where one owner requires her manager to maximize profit, whereas the rival-owner requires her manager to maximize sales revenue. The profit-maximizing manager turns his firm into a Stackelberg-leader, while the sales-revenue-maximizing manager turns his firm into a Stackelberg-follower. Further, the profit-maximizing manager may generate a larger firm profit relative to the sales-revenue-maximizing manager.     

The effect of production uncertainty on the labor-managed firm

The effects of production uncertainty on the behavior of the labor-managed, cooperative firm are examined and it is shown that they generally differ from the case of certainty and the case of the entrepreneurial, profit-maximizing firm. In particular, it is shown that the risk-averse (risk-seeking) cooperative will have a larger (smaller) ratio of labor to nonlabor input employed in production than the risk-neutral cooperative.     

Quantity-setting games with a dominant firm

We consider a possible game-theoretic foundation of Forchheimer’s model of dominant-firm price leadership based on quantity-setting games with one large firm and many small firms. If the large firm is the exogenously given first mover, we obtain Forchheimer’s model. We also investigate whether the large firm can emerge as a first mover of a timing game.     

Endogenous formation of coops and cooperative leagues

The labor-managed Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque country, and La Lega coops concentrated in North Central Italy, are grouped into leagues that enable them to reap economies of scale in key services such as R&D, marketing and finance. These leagues are relatively rare and there are fewer than a dozen of them globally. We develop a game-theoretic model of league formation to capture some of the strategic incentives behind the formation of labor-managed cooperatives (coops) and their agglomeration into a league. We then compare these incentives with those of conventional profit-maximizing firms to organize into a league. The main result of this paper shows that a divergence in these incentives stemming from their organizational differences may lead to the formation of a league of firms but not one of coops. This turns out to be true even though the coop has lower costs of production and the existence of a coop league would have been socially efficient. Anticipating the non-existence of a coop league then creates a disincentive for individual agents to form coops in the first place. This explains the relative rarity of coops, competing individually or as a part of a league, with conventional firms in imperfect markets.     

Wage-rise contract and endogenous timing in international mixed duopoly

This paper examines an endogenous-timing mixed model, where a public firm competes against a foreign private firm. Each firm first chooses the timing for adopting a wage-rise contract as a strategic instrument. The following situation is considered. In the first stage, each firm simultaneously and independently chooses the stage in which it adopts a wage-rise contract, namely either stage 2 or stage 3. In the second stage, the firm choosing stage 2 can adopt the wage-rise contract in this stage. In the third stage, the firm choosing stage 3 can adopt the wage-rise contract in this stage. At the end of the game, each firm simultaneously and independently chooses its output. The paper discusses the equilibrium of the endogenous-timing mixed model.     

Lifetime Employment Contract and Strategic Entry Deterrence: Cournot and Bertrand

This paper is based on a two-stage model of an incumbent firm and a potential entrant, and studies both quantity-setting competition and price-setting competition. We consider a lifetime-employment-contract policy as a strategic commitment that generates kinks in the reaction curve. Furthermore, demand functions are classified into two cases in terms of the strategic relevance between both firms. Therefore, we examine the following four cases: 'quantity-setting competition with strategic substitutes', 'quantity-setting competition with strategic complements', 'price-setting competition with strategic substitutes' and 'price-setting competition with strategic complements'. The purpose of this paper is to analyse entry deterrence in the four cases and to show the effectiveness of the lifetime-employment-contract policy as a result of its analyses.     

Regional foreign direct investment and technology spillover: evidence across different clusters in India

This paper examines whether there exist productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) to domestic firms at the regional level, using firm-level panel dataset covering 22 manufacturing industries in India from 2000 to 2012. In order to estimate the productivity spillovers from FDI at the regional level, we select 10 industrial clusters across 4 regions in India. In estimating productivity, we control for a possible simultaneity bias by using semi-parametric estimation techniques. We find that local firms benefit from horizontal and vertical FDI, but the benefits from the latter are found to be substantially stronger. The absorptive capacity of domestic firms is highly relevant to harvest the spilled technology from foreign-owned firms. Furthermore, we find that domestic firms belonging to high-technology industries benefit more from FDI at the regional level. We also find that market concentration is a crucial conduit for firm innovation, technological upgradation, and having a direct effect on local firm total factor productivity.     

Determinants of capacity utilization by firms in less developed countries

The factors which influenced the capacity utilization decision of two hundred firms in the light manufacturing sector in Thailand during the period 1962–1974 were analyzed. The profit-maximizing capacity utilization rate for each firm was calculated using the projected balance sheets and income statements the firms prepared at the time of their initial investment. This ‘optimal’ rate was roughly twice the rates chosen by the firms. The extent of nonoptimal capacity underutilization of a firm was a function of the nationality of the firm's owner, entry date, number of firms in the industry, projected profits, and the manager's perceived risk of multishift operations.