Essays on Firm Conduct Under Imperfect Competition PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Essays on Firm Conduct Under Imperfect Competition PDF full book. Access full book title Essays on Firm Conduct Under Imperfect Competition by Ryo Sakamoto (Ph.D.). Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Ryo Sakamoto (Ph.D.) Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
One of the central questions in industrial organization is whether firms compete or collude in oligopolistic markets, given the significant implications of collusion for market outcomes and competition policy. An extensive body of literature has emerged, focusing on empirically analyzing the degree of collusion and measuring its impact on welfare. However, this task is challenging because observed higher prices may be attributed to various factors such as a high degree of collusion, increased product differentiation, or higher marginal costs-all of which are unobserved. In this dissertation, I propose a new structural model of demand and supply that enables the flexible estimation of firm conduct as continuous conduct parameters in differentiated products markets. A significant advantage of the framework is its empirical tractability, even when our focus is on the conduct of a large number of firms. This innovation is achieved through my unique setup of the supply-side modeling. Unlike the previous studies, I construct the supply side of the model using an oligopolistic model developed by d'Aspremont, Dos Santos Ferreira, and Gérard-Varet (2007). Their model captures competition among firms in two dimensions: one is competition for market share and the other is competition for market size. This dichotomous characterization reduces the number of conduct parameters, making the estimation feasible for a larger number of firms. Importantly, the model retains flexibility on the degree of competition from monopolistic competition to collusion. I apply the model to analyze the US corn seed industry using a proprietary dataset on farm-level transactions for genetically modified seeds. Despite concerns regarding the ramifications of the growing market power of large biotech firms, there is limited understanding of whether firms compete or collude in their pricing strategies. My estimation results show that the five largest firms are all engaged in imperfect collusion, and I reject benchmark conduct such as price and quantity competition. The low degree of competition translates into high price-cost margins, which I estimate at approximately 38%-51%. The results of counterfactual simulations indicate that seed companies extract substantial rent from farmers through non-competitive pricing, and total welfare loss is measured at $3.65 billion over the period 2008-2014.
Author: Ryo Sakamoto (Ph.D.) Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
One of the central questions in industrial organization is whether firms compete or collude in oligopolistic markets, given the significant implications of collusion for market outcomes and competition policy. An extensive body of literature has emerged, focusing on empirically analyzing the degree of collusion and measuring its impact on welfare. However, this task is challenging because observed higher prices may be attributed to various factors such as a high degree of collusion, increased product differentiation, or higher marginal costs-all of which are unobserved. In this dissertation, I propose a new structural model of demand and supply that enables the flexible estimation of firm conduct as continuous conduct parameters in differentiated products markets. A significant advantage of the framework is its empirical tractability, even when our focus is on the conduct of a large number of firms. This innovation is achieved through my unique setup of the supply-side modeling. Unlike the previous studies, I construct the supply side of the model using an oligopolistic model developed by d'Aspremont, Dos Santos Ferreira, and Gérard-Varet (2007). Their model captures competition among firms in two dimensions: one is competition for market share and the other is competition for market size. This dichotomous characterization reduces the number of conduct parameters, making the estimation feasible for a larger number of firms. Importantly, the model retains flexibility on the degree of competition from monopolistic competition to collusion. I apply the model to analyze the US corn seed industry using a proprietary dataset on farm-level transactions for genetically modified seeds. Despite concerns regarding the ramifications of the growing market power of large biotech firms, there is limited understanding of whether firms compete or collude in their pricing strategies. My estimation results show that the five largest firms are all engaged in imperfect collusion, and I reject benchmark conduct such as price and quantity competition. The low degree of competition translates into high price-cost margins, which I estimate at approximately 38%-51%. The results of counterfactual simulations indicate that seed companies extract substantial rent from farmers through non-competitive pricing, and total welfare loss is measured at $3.65 billion over the period 2008-2014.
Author: Hassan Afrouzi Khosroshahi Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 394
Book Description
This dissertation investigates three questions about pricing and information acquisition incentives of imperfectly competitive firms, and studies the macroeconomic implications of those incentives within general equilibrium models. Chapter 1 studies why in countries where inflation has been low and stable, price setters display highly dispersed aggregate inflation expectations; especially so when they face fewer competitors. In contrast to the predictions of standard models, realized inflation deviates significantly from price setters’ aggregate inflation expectations. Instead, their own-industry inflation expectations are more accurate, and aggregate inflation tracks these expectations closely. I propose a new dynamic model of rational inattention with oligopolistic competition to explain these stylized facts. The Phillips curve relates aggregate inflation to price setters’ own-industry inflation expectation, and firms forego learning about aggregate variables to focus on their own-industry prices. This incentive is stronger when every firm faces fewer competitors. Using new firm-level survey evidence, I calibrate the degree of rational inattention and industry size in the model and find that a two-fold increase in the number of competitors reduces the half-life and on-impact response of output to a monetary policy shock by 40 and 15 percent, respectively. Chapter 2 is about the behavior of the price-cost markups. The cyclicality of markups is crucial to understanding the propagation of shocks and the comovement of macroeconomic variables. I show that the degree of inertia in the response of output to shocks is a fundamental determining factor for the cyclicality of markups in a broad class of models. In particular, markups follow a forward looking law of motion in which they depend on firms’ conditional expectations over the net present value of all future changes in output. I test this law of motion with data for firms’ expectations and find that, across different types of microfounded models of cyclical markups, the behavior of firms is most consistent with implicit collusion models. Calibrating an implicit collusion model to the U.S. data, I find that markups are procyclical when the model matches the observed inertial response of output to shocks, as commonly found in the data. Chapter 3 studies the pricing behavior of rationally inattentive firms when they face persistent productivity shocks along with transitory demand shocks. I show that prices respond persistently to transitory demand shocks, as firms optimally choose to be confused about the two types of the shocks. When a positive transitory demand shock is realized, it takes time for firms to disentangle it from a supply shock, during which they act as if there was a negative aggregate productivity shock. Therefore, an expansion caused by a positive demand shock is followed by a recession until firms fully recognize the origin of the change in their optimal price. I also develop a tractable method for solving linear quadratic rational inattention models in continuous time and derive semi-analytical results for impulse response functions of endogenous variables under rational inattention.
Author: Robert E. Kuenne Publisher: New York : Wiley ISBN: Category : CHAMBERLIN, EDWARD,1899- . THE THEORY OF MONOPOLISTIC COMPETITION Languages : en Pages : 408
Author: Claudio A. Calcagno Publisher: ISBN: Category : Competition Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
This thesis in applied microeconomics explores different aspects of imperfect competition. All three chapters are motivated by recent developments in real-world economies. First, I explore the implications of a recent reform by the European Commission whereby victims of antitrust injury can seek stand-alone private damages (SPDs) directly before courts. I show that any gain in deterrence has to be traded off against costly litigation and enforcement costs, and that these tradeoffs are heterogeneous across market sizes. SPDs can improve welfare only if the competition authority is sufficiently effective: private damages are a complement to (good) public enforcement, not a substitute. Finally, in the case of a resource-constrained competition authority, whilst a "hands-off" approach might have been warranted absent SPDs, this is no longer true once stand-alone actions are introduced. Second, I investigate under what conditions exclusion can arise under collective behaviour, in a setting with an efficient downstream entrant. Tacitly collusive equilibria can be sustained either by jointly excluding the entrant or through entry-accommodating strategies. The latter class of equilibria entails vertically integrated incumbents collusively extracting the rent deriving from the entry of a more efficient downstream competitor. I show that, for intermediate discount factors, whenever the entrant is not too much more efficient than the incumbents, the integrated firms find exclusionary collusive equilibria more profitable than entryaccommodating collusive equilibria. Moreover, exclusionary collusive equilibria arise as a (profitable) outcome when the entrant's cost is uncertain (and equilibrium tariffs will be such that only very efficient entrants will be allowed in). The retail petrol market (the object of recent antitrust scrutiny) is then analysed as a useful setting to apply my framework. Third, in a paper with Bertsch and Le Quement, we study some possible implications of the bailout regimes witnessed in the aftermath of the recent financial crisis. Notwithstanding the well-known effects of State aid on moral hazard, governments setting up aid schemes to ailing banks (or firms more generally) may increase the likelihood of (tacit) collusion in industries characterised by idiosyncratic shocks. In particular, we show that, in a repeated-game setting, a systematic bailout regime increases the expected profits from cooperation and simultaneously raises the probability that competitors will still be in business to carry out punishment against cheaters. This is detrimental for welfare for intermediate discount factors or (for any discount factor) whenever the direct rescue costs are too large.
Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 0226074188 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 508
Book Description
New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.
Author: Jonathan B. Baker Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674975782 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 369
Book Description
At a time when tech giants have amassed vast market power, Jonathan Baker shows how laws and regulations can be updated to ensure more competition. The sooner courts and antitrust enforcement agencies stop listening to the Chicago school and start paying attention to modern economics, the sooner Americans will reap the benefits of competition.
Author: Ryo Sakamoto (Ph.D.)
Author: Ryo Sakamoto (Ph.D.)
Author: Hassan Afrouzi Khosroshahi
Author: Andrew Lewis
Author: Robert E. Kuenne
Author: Mingxia Zhang
Author: Claudio A. Calcagno
Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan
Author: Lawrence Abbott
Author: Jonathan B. Baker
Author: Joan Robinson