56,385 research outputs found
Price discrimination and market power in export markets: The case of the ceramic tile industry.
This paper combines the pricing-to-market equation and the residual demand elasticity equation to measure the extent of competition in the export markets of ceramic tiles, which has been dominated by Italian and Spanish producers since the late eighties. The findings show that the tile exporters enjoyed substantial market power over the period 1988-1998, and limited evidence that the export market has become more competitive over time.price discrimination, market power, export markets, ceramic tile industry
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Opaque Selling
We study “opaque” selling in multiproduct environments – a marketing practice in which sellers strategically withhold product information by keeping important characteristics of their products hidden until after purchase. We show that a monopolist will always use opaque selling, but it is not first-best optimal to do so. However, opaque selling might be used at the constrained optimum (with the monopolist’s pricing behavior taken as given). For linear disutility costs, it is optimal for a monopolist to offer a single opaque product
Market Failures in Real-Time Metering: A Theoretical Look
Restructuring the electricity market may secure efficiencies by moving away from cost-of-service regulation, with typically (but not necessarily) time-invariant prices, and allowing prices to reflect how costs change. Charging "real time" prices requires that electricity use be measured according to when one uses it. Arguments that such real-time metering should be a policy objective promoted by subsidizing meters or delaying restructuring until meters are installed, require more than these potential benefits. They require positive externalities to imply that too few meters would be installed through private transactions. Real-time metering presents no systematic externalities when utilities must serve peak period users, and may present negative externalities under some conditions. Positive externalities are likely when electricity is rationed through blackouts. Real-time metering may or may not increase welfare when peak period wholesale markets are not competitive; one might want to prohibit real-time metering in such situations even if metering itself were costless.real-time metering electricity restructuring, deregulation, rationing, externalities
Constrained Regulatory Exit in Energy Law
In recent years, the federal government’s efforts to open up competitive electricity markets have transformed how we think about the regulation of energy. In many respects, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) broad “deregulatory” efforts, which commenced in the 1990s, might appear to be a case of paradigmatic regulatory exit as defined by J.B. Ruhl and Jim Salzman. But our case study of FERC’s restructuring of wholesale electricity markets reveals some important institutional features that make exit in federalism contexts, and under federal statutory duties, a rich and difficult problem. In the context of energy, exit from one regulatory sphere can create regulatory gaps. This has led FERC, which largely exited the regulation of wholesale electricity rates, to increase regulation in other spheres. It has also invited forms of intergovernmental exchange, as states have emulated or otherwise responded to FERC’s regulatory modifications in the areas in which states have jurisdiction. In this sense, the transition to competitive energy supply markets has involved constrained exit characterized by a hydraulic back-and-forth between regulators and institutions in an effort to ensure that statutory duties are fulfilled and other public needs are met.
This assessment of regulatory exchange has a prescriptive implication: a federal regulator seeking to exit specific forms of conventional regulation needs to proactively develop strategies to facilitate regulatory exchange, while simultaneously preserving its authority over important substantive values related to its regulatory mission. Attention to “offsetting” regulations is often necessary to ensure that problematic regulatory gaps will not arise. In the energy context, these strategies might also include the use of mechanisms that give other institutions a voice in implementing exit strategies, as well as better ex ante regulatory planning for market enforcement that will continue after partial exit. We argue that it is not only a good strategy for federal regulators to recognize this hydraulic feature of exit, but that cooperative federalism statutes such as the Federal Power Act often require them to do so
Offloading in Software Defined Network at Edge with Information Asymmetry: A Contract Theoretical Approach
The proliferation of highly capable mobile devices such as smartphones and
tablets has significantly increased the demand for wireless access. Software
defined network (SDN) at edge is viewed as one promising technology to simplify
the traffic offloading process for current wireless networks. In this paper, we
investigate the incentive problem in SDN-at-edge of how to motivate a third
party access points (APs) such as WiFi and smallcells to offload traffic for
the central base stations (BSs). The APs will only admit the traffic from the
BS under the precondition that their own traffic demand is satisfied. Under the
information asymmetry that the APs know more about own traffic demands, the BS
needs to distribute the payment in accordance with the APs' idle capacity to
maintain a compatible incentive. First, we apply a contract-theoretic approach
to model and analyze the service trading between the BS and APs. Furthermore,
other two incentive mechanisms: optimal discrimination contract and linear
pricing contract are introduced to serve as the comparisons of the anti adverse
selection contract. Finally, the simulation results show that the contract can
effectively incentivize APs' participation and offload the cellular network
traffic. Furthermore, the anti adverse selection contract achieves the optimal
outcome under the information asymmetry scenario.Comment: 10 pages, 9 figure
Strategies of an incubent constrained to supply entrants : the case of european gas release programs
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