Efficient division of profits from complementary innovations

Many products—including microprocessors, telecommunications devices, computer software, and on-line auction services—make use of multiple technologies, each of which is essential to make or sell the product. The owner of one technology benefits from the existence of complementary technologies. We show that, despite this externality, the structure of payoffs that support efficient R&D investment by duopolists racing to discover a single innovation generalizes to the structure that supports efficient investment for complementary innovations. The paper also examines how alternative intellectual property regimes and legal institutions affect R&D investment in complementary technologies. The results have policy implications for the organization of R&D, the assessment of damages for patent infringement, and allocations of value in patent pools.     

Is targeted advertising always beneficial?

In this paper, we study a simple model in which two horizontally differentiated firms compete in prices and targeted advertising on an initially uninformed market. First, the Nash equilibrium is fully characterized. We prove that when the advertising cost is low, firms target only their “natural markets”, while they cross-advertise when this cost is high. Second, the outcome at equilibrium is compared with random advertising. Surprisingly, we prove that firms' equilibrium profits may be lower with targeted advertising relative to random advertising, while firms are given more options with targeted advertising.     

Corrigendum to “The strategic choice of union-oligopoly bargaining agenda” [Int. J. Ind. Organ. 17 (1999) 1029-1040]

Assuming Cournot competition, Bughin (1999, 'The strategic choice of union-oligopoly bargaining agenda', International Journal of Industrial Organization) states that in a unionized oligopoly with firm specific negotiations, Efficient Bargaining (EB) is always the industry equilibrium both under blockaded and non-blockaded market structures. Extending Bughin's (1999) framework to a conjectural variation model, this note shows that EB emerges as equilibrium only for entry deterrence reasons. In all other cases, conflict of interests among the bargaining parties arise due todifference in dominant strategies, whatever is the degree of competitiveness of the industry.     

On the duration of technology licensing

We model an innovator's choice of payment scheme and duration as a joint decision in a multi-period licensing game with potential future innovations and some irreversibility of technology transfer. We find that it may be optimal to license the innovation for less than the full length of the patent and that royalty contracts can be more profitable than fixed-fee licensing even in the absence of information asymmetry and risk aversion. Moreover, licensing contracts based on royalty have a longer duration than fixed-fee licenses and are more likely to be used in industries where innovations are frequent and intellectual property protection is weak. Our paper also highlights an important link between the study of technology licensing and the theory of durable goods.     

Coordination and the provision of incentives to a common regulated firm

This paper considers the problem faced by two regulators in providing incentives to a common (privately informed) regulated firm under various degrees of coordination. In the model, the firm exerts effort toward cost reduction and self-dealing, and incentives can be input-based (monitoring) and output-based (demanded cost targets). Full coordination between the regulators leads to the second best allocation. A setting in which the regulators do not fully coordinate leads to (i) higher overall monitoring (more aggressive input-based incentives) and (ii) higher demanded cost targets (i.e., more lenience in terms of output-based incentives). As a consequence of (i), in all possible equilibria, the effort toward cost reduction will be smaller when the agent reports to two regulators who do not coordinate. (i) and (ii) imply that the impact on the effort toward self-dealing activities is ambiguous. In our leading example, self-dealing will be larger if the regulators coordinate on monitoring levels but smaller if they choose monitoring levels independently.     

Is there a U-shaped relation between competition and investment?

We consider a two-stage game with cost-reducing investments followed by a linear differentiated Cournot duopoly. With competition inversely parameterized by the extent of product differentiation, investment in the subgame perfect equilibrium is typically minimal for intermediate levels of competition. Laboratory experiments partly confirm the U-shape in a reduced one-stage version of the game. In the two-stage version, there is no evidence for positive effects of moving from intermediate to intense competition.     

Product market pricing power, industry concentration and analysts’ earnings forecasts

This is the first study to establish a link between product market power and analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy and bias. Relating two different dimensions of market power to earnings forecastability, we document that (a) a firm’s relative pricing power and (b) its industry concentration are strong positive determinants of analysts’ earnings forecast accuracy. We find that forecasting earnings of higher market power firms is less complex due to their ability to withstand cost shocks as well as greater informational-efficiency enjoyed by such firms. Further, forecast optimism increases with weakening product market pricing power and with lower industry concentration. The knowledge derived from this study will hopefully improve the accuracy of equity valuation, and thereby engender better buy-side (stock selections) and sell-side recommendations by analysts. Our analysis also suggests that brokerage firms compensating analysts based on forecast accuracy need to adjust for the differential in the information complexity of different industries.     

Deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the Mexican banking system: Effects on competition

This paper analyzes the evolution of competition in the Mexican banking system in the period 1993-2005, a period of deregulation, liberalization and consolidation of the sector. For this purpose we use two indicators of competition from the theory of industrial organization (the Lerner index and the Panzar and Rosse’s H-statistic). The empirical evidence does not permit us to reject the existence of monopolistic competition. The Lerner index shows a decrease in competitive rivalry in the deposit market and an increase in the loan market, a cross subsidization strategy being observed. The results obtained call into question the effectiveness of the measures implemented hitherto, aimed at increasing the competition of the Mexican banking system.     

The effect of SOX on small auditor exits and audit quality

We find that over six hundred auditors with fewer than 100 SEC clients exit the market following SOX. Compared to the non-exiting auditors, the exiting auditors are lower quality, where quality is gauged by: (1) avoidance of AICPA peer reviews and failure to comply with PCAOB rules, and (2) severity of the peer review and inspection reports. In addition, clients of exiting auditors receive higher quality auditing from successor auditors, as captured by a greater likelihood of receiving going concern opinions. Our results suggest that the PCAOB inspections improve audit quality by incentivizing low quality auditors to exit the market.     

Regime switching and oligopsony power: the case of U.S. beef processing

In this article, we estimate a model of oligopsony behavior under imperfect monitoring of rival actions to analyze weekly marketing margin data for the U.S. beef packing industry. Oligopsonists are hypothesized to follow a discontinuous pricing strategy in equilibrium, and we focus on shocks in the normal throughput of supply as a potential catalyst for regime switching between cooperative and noncooperative phases. We adopt an algorithm developed by Bellone (2005) that relies on Hamilton’s (1989) multivariate first‐order Markov process to test for the cooperative/noncooperative switching behavior. We find strong evidence that links switching conduct by packers to disruptions in coordinating the derived demands for processed beef with the supply of live cattle. Once switched, cooperative regimes lasted an average of 21 weeks, while noncooperative regimes averaged 33 weeks. The average marketing margin for processed beef was 68% lower in the noncooperative regimes compared to the cooperative regimes. This led to an annual average increase in profits of 408 million dollars to the beef packing industry and about an 8–9% reduction in live cattle prices.