Competition Policy: What are the Costs and Benefits of Measuring its Costs and Benefits?

Summary  Competition authorities are increasingly measuring the effects of their enforcement actions, seeking a robust justification for the proliferation of competition policy. We highlight the importance of identifying the right counterfactual against which to measure effects, and set out the relevant categories of costs and benefits. We then explore how a balance can be struck between the benefits and inherent limitations of these measurement exercises. Relatively crude analyses of cartel action benefits can be sufficient to achieve public legitimacy for competition policy. Assessing the effects of merger and conduct inquiries is often ambiguous, but could be used to improve decision-making processes. Director and Managing Consultant, respectively, at Oxera, Oxford and London. The valuable comments of Fod Barnes, Kerry Hughes and an anonymous referee are gratefully acknowledged. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors alone.     

Co-branding on industrial markets

During the last decade branding has developed to be one of the main focus areas in consumer marketing. In the industrial marketing area there has only been limited attention to this phenomenon. In this paper we focus on how co-branding can be used on industrial markets to increase value. Through an empirical study of professional purchasers' attitudes towards co-branding activities between two companies, we explore the potential of this strategy.     

On optimal control of income generating activities, and the value of flexible production design

The paper provides a closed form solution for the value of a firm which costlessly can change its mode of operation between two activities. The technology is such that production is zero from the inactive production line. In addition we assume that the production potential on any production line is idle when not operated, else the production follows a geometric Brownian motion. Although this framework is rather general, it is motivated by the problem to produce a natural resource located in two separate wells/ores, using a single (flexible) production unit. For what seems to be reasonable parameter values, the flexible unit is seen to achieve a surprisingly large value relative to the value achievable by a comprehensive unit, producing both alternatives simultaneously. In addition it is interesting to note that switching might occur even if the active production line gives the highest immediate income.     

The economic effects of the 1920 eight-hour working day reform in Sweden

In 1920, the working day in Swedish manufacturing and services was cut from 10 to 8 hours without wages being cut correspondingly. Since workers demanded and got the same daily wage working 8 hours as they had with 10, real hourly wages increased dramatically; they were about 50% higher in 1921–1922 than they had been in 1919. This is the largest wage push in Swedish history, and this paper studies the consequences for profits, investments, capital intensity and unemployment. In traded manufacturing employers responded by increasing capital intensity and did not compensate for rising wages by raising prices, which led to a combination of jobless growth and low profit rates in the 1920s. Firms in non-traded manufacturing and services could raise prices and conserve profitability to a higher degree. In total, the effects of the reform were pro-labour. We discuss the implications for our understanding of interwar wages and employment, the literature on the decrease in inequality found in most industrial countries around 1920 and the rise of the ‘Swedish model’ in the 1920s and 1930s.     

Fetal Iodine Deficiency and Schooling: A Replication of Field,Robles, and Torero (2009)*

Scholars have theorized that congenital health endowment is an important determinant of economic outcomes later in a person's life. Field, Robles, and Torero (2009, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1, 140–169) find large increases in educational attainment caused by a reduction of fetal iodine deficiency following a set of iodine supplementation programs in Tanzania. We revisit the Tanzanian iodine programs with a narrow and wide replication of the study by Field et al. We are able to exactly replicate the original results. We find, however, that the findings are sensitive to alternative specification choices and sample restrictions. We try to address some of these concerns in the wide replication; we increase the sample size fourfold, and we improve the precision of the treatment variable by incorporating new institutional and medical insights. Despite the improvements, no effect is found. We conclude that the available data do not provide sufficient power to detect a possible effect, as treatment assignment cannot be measured with sufficient precision.     

Advanced purchasing, spillovers and innovative discovery

Advanced product development distinguishes itself by being surrounded by a “cloud of technology spillovers” available to external users in proportion to their competence to commercialize them. The local capacity to commercialize spillovers is experience based and hence more narrow than the range of innovations. The cloud will therefore be incompletely explored. While the value of the cloud to society may be greater than the development investment, the value captured by the producer is often not sufficient to make the product development privately profitable. The producer faces the property rights problem of how to charge for the dual product it develops, the product itself and as much as possible for the technology cloud. The public and private customers, however, appreciate the situation differently. While the former appears in the double customer role of being interested in both the product procured and the spillover benefits to society, the latter is not interested in paying for spillovers that only benefit society. Marketing the product, therefore, involves the ability to present a credible case for the economic value to society of the spillovers. To do that, a theory is needed that demonstrates both the user value to the customer, and the entrepreneurial capacity of the economy to commercialize the spillovers. The theoretical argument is illustrated with the case of downstream industrial business formation around Swedish military aircraft industry.     

北欧电子健康概况与区域信息系统实例 电子健康在瑞典、丹麦和挪威:大范围应用地区电子健康解决方案

当今,全世界各国家和地区的卫生部门都在借助电子健康,改进他们的卫生系统,使国民或者病人受益.电子健康在这里,是指所有医疗保健方面的信息通讯技术的应用.为了改进医疗健康服务,信息通讯技术在以下三方面有很大的应用:·教育国民和专业人员如何诊治和预防疾病;·公共卫生的监督和规划;·生物医学研究和诊疗常规的知识库管理.