Price discrimination via information provision

We study price discrimination where different prices are offered as a bundle with different levels of information about a product. The seller’s price discrimination induces high valuation buyers to purchase a good without information and low valuation buyers to purchase with information. Our analysis highlights several interesting results about price discrimination: (i) the seller’s choice of information provision is the combination of full information and no information, (ii) products can be cheaper without information provision than with information provision, (iii) as a result of price discrimination, prices can be more dispersed as buyers’ valuations become largely similar, and (iv) the high valuation buyers purchase a damaged good and may earn negative surplus. Furthermore, we investigate under which circumstances price discrimination is more profitable than uniform pricing. We show that a decline in transportation costs which facilitate price discrimination can be welfare reducing.     

OPTIMAL WEIGHT FOR REALIZED VARIANCE BASED ON INTERMITTENT HIGH‐FREQUENCY DATA*

Japanese stock markets have two types of breaks, overnight and lunch, during which no trading occurs, causing an inevitable increased variance in estimating daily volatility via a naive realized variance (RV). In order to perform a more stabilized estimation, we modify Hansen and Lunde's weighting technique. As an empirical study, we estimate optimal weights by using a particular approach for Japanese stock data listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and then compare the forecast performance of weighted and non‐weighted RV through an autoregressive fractionally integrated moving average model. The empirical result indicates that the appropriate use of the optimally weighted RV can lead to remarkably smaller estimation variance compared with the naive RV, in many series. Therefore a more accurate forecasting of daily volatility data is obtained. Finally, we perform a Monte Carlo simulation to support the empirical result.     

Mutual supervision in preshipment inspection programs

Preshipment inspection (PSI) programmes are implemented in many developing countries to assist governments in the collection of revenue at their borders. These programs consist of the delegation of the inspection of imports to a private firm. To study these PSI programmes, we develop a hierarchical agency model in which the government authority can rely on two supervisors, namely the private inspection firm and the customs administration, to control importers' declarations. The government's optimal contract is fully characterized. We devote some attention to the inspection policy and its comparative statics properties. In particular, we identify the situations in which PSI programmes are revenue enhancing. We also discuss the reconciliation policy, i.e. what to do in case of conflicting inspection reports by the inspection firm and the customs administration. In the optimal mechanism, mutual supervision between the inspection firm and the customs administration is used to provide adequate incentives to all parties.     

TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT IN WHOLESALE INTERNATIONAL ROAMING: TOWARDS A MORE EFFICIENT MARKET?*

Despite a general trend of lower charges for mobile calls, in Europe, prices for international roaming calls have remained at levels that are surprisingly high. The apparent reluctance of mobile network operators to lower roaming tariff is generating many antitrust concerns. This paper presents in a two‐country two‐firm framework the functioning of the current system governing wholesale international roaming agreements based on interoperator tariffs. The focus is on the role of traffic management; thanks to the emergence of traffic direction techniques, mobile network operators are allowed to select the roaming partner. We show that, unless these techniques do not allow for perfect control on traffic flows, traffic management does not improve the market's efficiency. In line with the regulatory mechanism recently adopted by the European Commission, we show that a simple price cap mechanism may restore partial efficiency in the wholesale market. We also show that although cross‐border cooperation at the wholesale level is Pareto efficient, it will not emerge as an equilibrium of a two‐sided matching game.     

REGULATORY ENVIRONMENT ANALYSIS IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN TELECOMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY

The regulation of the telecommunications industry in South Africa is, by design, a complex matter, since it is mired with overlaps of mandates between the regulator, Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (ICASA) and the Competition Commission on competition matters, coupled with vetoing powers of the Minister of Communications. The Harvard Business Model is employed in this article to show that there is a lack of coordinated effort between the regulator and its supporting structures. This then compromises efficiency as demanded by Parliament from state enacted bodies. Since ICASA is faced with dynamic economic and regulatory challenges, it is recommended that the regulator be fully resourced and granted regulatory as well as competitive authority in the telecommunications industry.     

Prices vs. quantities: Public finance and the choice of regulatory instruments

Since Montgomery [1972. Markets in licenses and efficient pollution control programs. Journal of Economic Theory 5, 395-418] and Weitzman [1974. Prices vs. quantities. Review of Economic Studies 41, 477-491], it has generally been assumed that, in a full-information setting, tradable quotas and taxes are equivalent regulatory instruments. We demonstrate that, if the government is movitated by public-finance concerns, this equivalence holds only if quotas are short lived. Moreover, the government prefers quotas with the shortest possible lifetime, or, what is equivalent in our setting, taxes.     

Firm Heterogeneity,Contract Enforcement,and the Industry Dynamics of Offshoring*

We develop an endogenous growth model with R&D spillovers to study the long‐run consequences of offshoring with firm heterogeneity and incomplete contracts. In so doing, we model offshoring as the geographical fragmentation of a firm's production chain between a home upstream division and a foreign downstream division. While there is always a positive correlation between upstream bargaining weight and offshoring activities, there is an inverted U‐shaped relationship between these and growth. Whether offshoring with incomplete contracts also increases consumption depends on firm heterogeneity. As for welfare, whereas with complete contracts an R&D subsidy is enough to solve the inefficiency due to R&D spillovers, with incomplete contracts a production subsidy is also needed.     

Industry concentration in South African manufacturing industry: Trends and consequences, 1972–96

This paper reports industry concentration measures for the South African manufacturing sector over the 1972–1996 period for the three digit industry classification. Noted are high level of industry concentration in South African manufacturing, and a rising trend in concentration across a wide range of industries as measured by the Gini coefficient, though some countervailing evidence emerges on the Rosenbluth index. Analytically the paper examines the impact of concentration on employment and investment rates. Results show that increased concentration unambiguously lowers employment. For investment rates, increased inequality of market share serves to raise investment rates, while falling firm numbers for any given inequality of market share lowers investment rates. The difference is consistent with a disciplining effect of a competitive fringe of firms on the behaviour of large firms in a market.     

Products and Productivity*

When firms make decisions about which product to manufacture at a more disaggregated level than observed in the data, measured firm productivity reflects both characteristics of the firm and attributes of the products that are non‐randomly chosen by the firm. This paper develops a model of industry equilibrium in which firms endogenously sort across products and characterizes the resulting bias in measured firm and aggregate productivity. Calibrating the model's parameters, we show that endogenous product selection can have quantitatively important effects on measured firm and aggregate productivity and their response to changes in parameter values.     

Enhancing market discipline in banking: The role of subordinated debt in financial regulatory reform

The increasing complexity of large financial firms has led to consideration of alternative regulatory structures. This has intensified recently because of the worldwide turmoil in financial markets. One important consideration has been to increase reliance on market discipline—most notably, increased reliance on subordinated debt (sub-debt) in the bank capital structure to discipline banks’ risk taking. This proposal, however, has been subject to criticism related to the quality of the signal generated in current sub-debt markets. We argue that previous studies evaluating the potential usefulness of sub-debt proposals have evaluated sub-debt spreads in a very different environment from that characterized by a fully implemented sub-debt program, where the market will become deeper, issuance will be more frequent, debt will be viewed as a more viable means to raise capital, bond dealers will be less reluctant to publicly disclose more details on debt transactions, and generally, the market will be more closely followed. As a test to see how the quality of the signal may change, we evaluate the risk-spread relationship—accounting for the enhanced liquidity and market transparency surrounding new debt issues. Our empirical results indicate a superior risk-spread relationship surrounding the period of new debt issuance due, we posit, to greater liquidity and transparency. Our results overall suggest that the degree of market discipline would be significantly enhanced by a mandatory sub-debt program, thus suggesting a potential role for sub-debt in the banking regulatory reform.