Micro-Founded Institutions and Macro-Founded Individuals: The Dual Nature of Profit

Starting from the observation that surplus-value is almost always due to the collective undertaking of non additively separable human capital investments, this paper introduces a theory of the institutional structure of production where groups are taken as units of analysis in a multi-level competition framework inspired by Marx’s critique of the ‘abstract man’. The main result is that monopoly profit is not the only meaningful notion of profit besides the value of individual contribution and, as a consequence, freeentry and competition do not necessarily wipe it outvalue, power, conflict, competition, social classes

Globalisation and Market Structure

This paper reviews some puzzling economic aspects of globalisation and argues that they cannot be satisfactorily addressed in perfectly or monopolistically competitive models. Drawing on recent work, a model of oligopoly in general equilibrium is sketched. The model ensures theoretical consistency by assuming that firms are large in their own markets but small in the economy as a whole, and ensures tractability by assuming quadratic preferences defined over a continuum of goods. Applications considered include the effects of trade liberalisation on industrial structure, on cross-border merger waves, and on the distribution of income between skilled and unskilled workers.Cross-border mergers; GOLE (General Oligopolistic Equilibrium); market integration; trade and wages; trade liberalisation

A bi-level programming approach for the shipper-carrier network problem

The Stackelberg game betweenshippers and carriers in an intermodal network is formulated as a bi-levelprogram. In this network, shippers make production, consumption, androuting decisions while carriers make pricing and routing decisions.The oligopolistic carrier pricing and routing problem, which comprisesthe upper level of the bi-level program, is formulated either as a nonlinearconstrained optimization problem or as a variational inequality problem,depending on whether the oligopolistic carriers choose to collude orcompete with each other in their pricing decision. The shippers\u27 decisionbehavior is defined by the spatial price equilibrium principle. Forthe spatial price equilibrium problem, which is the lower level of thebi-level program, a variational inequality formulation is used to accountfor the asymmetric interactions between flows of different commoditytypes. A sensitivity analysis-based heuristic algorithm is proposedto solve the program. An example application of the bi-level programmingapproach analyzes the behavior of two marine terminal operators. Theterminal operators are considered to be under the same Port Authority.The bi-level programming approach is then used to evaluate the PortAuthority\u27s alternative investment strategies

Network Cournot Competition

Cournot competition is a fundamental economic model that represents firms competing in a single market of a homogeneous good. Each firm tries to maximize its utility---a function of the production cost as well as market price of the product---by deciding on the amount of production. In today's dynamic and diverse economy, many firms often compete in more than one market simultaneously, i.e., each market might be shared among a subset of these firms. In this situation, a bipartite graph models the access restriction where firms are on one side, markets are on the other side, and edges demonstrate whether a firm has access to a market or not. We call this game \emph{Network Cournot Competition} (NCC). In this paper, we propose algorithms for finding pure Nash equilibria of NCC games in different situations. First, we carefully design a potential function for NCC, when the price functions for markets are linear functions of the production in that market. However, for nonlinear price functions, this approach is not feasible. We model the problem as a nonlinear complementarity problem in this case, and design a polynomial-time algorithm that finds an equilibrium of the game for strongly convex cost functions and strongly monotone revenue functions. We also explore the class of price functions that ensures strong monotonicity of the revenue function, and show it consists of a broad class of functions. Moreover, we discuss the uniqueness of equilibria in both of these cases which means our algorithms find the unique equilibria of the games. Last but not least, when the cost of production in one market is independent from the cost of production in other markets for all firms, the problem can be separated into several independent classical \emph{Cournot Oligopoly} problems. We give the first combinatorial algorithm for this widely studied problem

Measuring the Gains to Groundwater Management with Recursive Utility

Replaced with revised version of paper 07/20/05.Recursive Utility, Dynamic Games, Groundwater Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy, D91, C73, Q25,

Multi-Leader Multi-Follower Model with Aggregative Uncertainty

We study a non-cooperative game with aggregative structure, namely when the payoffs depend on the strategies of the opponent players through an aggregator function. We assume that a subset of players behave as leaders in a Stackelberg model. The leaders, as well the followers, act non-cooperatively between themselves and solve a Nash equilibrium problem. We assume an exogenous uncertainty affecting the aggregator and we obtain existence results for the stochastic resulting game. Some examples are illustrated

Market Power in Outputs and Inputs: An Empirical Application to Banking

This paper provides evidence on the empirical separability of input and output market imperfections. We specify a model of banking competition and simultaneously estimate bank conduct in output (loan) and input (deposit) markets. Our results suggest that firms display some degree of noncompetitive behavior in both the loan and the deposit markets. Moreover, we find that the input side and the output side are empirically separable, that is the measurement of market power on one side of the market is not affected by assuming that the other side of the market is perfectly competitive. Our results suggest that empirical studies of market power that concentrate on either the input side or the output side, are not subject to significant misspecification error. ZUSAMMENFASSUNG - (Marktmacht auf Input- und Outputmärkten: Eine Empirische Anwendung auf den Bankensektor) Der Aufsatz untersucht den Zusammenhang von Unvollkommenheiten auf Input- und auf Outputmärkten. Im Rahmen eines Wettbewerbsmodells für den Bankensektor wird die Wechselwirkung zwischen Outputmarkt, d.h. bei der Kreditvergabe, und Inputmarkt (Geldanlage) empirisch untersucht. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Banken auf beiden Seiten des Marktes eine gewisse Marktmacht ausüben können. Allerdings ist die Wechselwirkung begrenzt, sodass eine separate Betrachtungsweise von Input- und Outputmärkten möglich ist. Dies bedeutet wiederum, dass empirische Untersuchungen, die jeweils nur eine Seite des Marktes analysieren, keinen signifikanten Verzerrungen unterliegen.Measuring Market Power, Banking

Matroids are Immune to Braess Paradox

The famous Braess paradox describes the following phenomenon: It might happen that the improvement of resources, like building a new street within a congested network, may in fact lead to larger costs for the players in an equilibrium. In this paper we consider general nonatomic congestion games and give a characterization of the maximal combinatorial property of strategy spaces for which Braess paradox does not occur. In a nutshell, bases of matroids are exactly this maximal structure. We prove our characterization by two novel sensitivity results for convex separable optimization problems over polymatroid base polyhedra which may be of independent interest.Comment: 21 page