Monopoly Pricing of Experience Goods

We develop a dynamic model of experience goods pricing with independent private valuations. We show that the optimal paths of sales and prices can be described in terms of a simple dichotomy. In a mass market, prices are declining over time. In a niche market, the optimal prices are initially low followed by higher prices that extract surplus from the buyers with a high willingness to pay. We consider extensions of the model to integrate elements of social rather than private learning and turnover among buyers.Monopoly, dynamic pricing, learning, experience goods, continuous time, Markov perfect equilibrium

Price Behaviour and Business Behaviour

administered prices business objectives competition corporate concentration corporation full cost marginalism market prices monopoly oligopoly price theory profit target rate of returnThe present essay is the second in a series of three papers which examine alternative approaches to inflation. Here we identify some of the principal criticisms expressed against neoclassical views on price behaviour and business behaviour. These challenges grew from the early discovery of ‘administered prices’ by Means and the subsequent findings by Hall and Hitch regarding ‘full cost’ pricing. The notions that industrial prices were relatively inflexible and that businessmen set those prices by imprecise rules of thumb stood in sharp contrast to the pristine simplicity of neoclassical models. Yet these attempts for greater realism seemed to undermine the prospects of constructing a coherent theory for prices

Capacity utilization and market power.

In a monopolistic competition framework, we propose a dynamic model in which capacity underutilization is a macroeconomic equilibrium feature relying on a diversity of microeconomic situations. Capacity underutilization follows from microeconomic uncertainty at the time firms must decide on their productive capacity. We settle a relationship between capacity utilization and markups via the effect of capacity utilization rate changes on firms' market power. We show that such a relationship influences significantly the short run response of the economy to exogenous shocks. In particular, the same shock can have quite different short run effects depending on the characteristics of the initial stationary state (low or high capacity utilization rate).Capacity Utilization; Markups; Monopolistic Competition; Market Power;

SPATIAL-COMPETITION, INTEGRATED FRAMEWORK OF CENTRAL-PLACE SYSTEM WITH AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES

It is argued that the trade-off interaction between agglomeration economies and transportation costs cannot be excluded from the analysis of the central-place system. First, an overlapping-area model between two competitors of market areas is examined both cases in homogeneous and differentiated products together with the relevant formation of supply areas. The analysis then further explores an exclusive-area model in the duopoly and oligopoly conditions of market areas and the formation process of supply areas. Finally, consideration is given to the methodological connectivity between central-place system and agglomeration economies.FIRM LOCATION, AGGLOMERATION ECONOMIES, TRANSPORTATION COSTS, CENTRAL PLACE SYSTEM

Market Power in the Nordic Wholesale Electricity Market: A Survey of the Empirical Evidence

We review the recent empirical research concerning market power on the Nordic wholesale market for electricity, Nord Pool. There is no evidence of blatant and systematic exploitation of system level market power on Nord Pool. However, generation companies seem from time to time able to take advantage of capacity constraints in transmission to wield regional market power. Market power can manifest itself in a number of ways which have so far escaped empirical scrutiny. We discuss investment incentives, vertical integration and buyer power, as well as withholding of base-load (nuclear) capacity.Electricity Markets; Deregulation; Market Power; Hydro Power; Transmission Constraints

Online Revenue Maximization for Server Pricing

Efficient and truthful mechanisms to price resources on remote servers/machines has been the subject of much work in recent years due to the importance of the cloud market. This paper considers revenue maximization in the online stochastic setting with non-preemptive jobs and a unit capacity server. One agent/job arrives at every time step, with parameters drawn from an underlying unknown distribution. We design a posted-price mechanism which can be efficiently computed, and is revenue-optimal in expectation and in retrospect, up to additive error. The prices are posted prior to learning the agent's type, and the computed pricing scheme is deterministic, depending only on the length of the allotted time interval and on the earliest time the server is available. If the distribution of agent's type is only learned from observing the jobs that are executed, we prove that a polynomial number of samples is sufficient to obtain a near-optimal truthful pricing strategy