Why are losses from trade unlikely?

© 2015. Examining a standard monopolistic competition model with unspecified utility/cost functions, we find necessary and sufficient conditions on their elasticities for welfare losses to arise from trade or market expansion. Two numerical examples explain the losses (under unrealistic elasticities)

Endogenous Product Differentiation, Market Size and Prices

Recent empirical evidence suggests that prices for some goods and services are higher in larger markets. This paper provides a demand-side explanation for this phenomenon when firms can choose how much to differentiate their products in a model of monopolistic competition with horizontal product differentiation. The model proposes that consumers love of variety makes them more sensitive to product differentiation efforts by firms, which leads to higher prices in larger markets. At the same time, endogenous product differentiation modeled in this way can lead to a positive and concave relationship between market size and entry

Chain Store Against Manufacturers: Regulation Can Mitigate Market Distortion

Contemporary domination of chain-stores in retailing is modeled, perceiving a monopolistic retailer as a market leader. A myriad of her suppliers compete in a monopolistic competitive sector, displaying quadratic consumers' preferences for a differentiated good. The leader announces her markup before the suppliers choose their prices/quantities. She may restrict the range of suppliers or allow for free entry. Then, a market distortion, stemming from double marginalization and excessive variety would be softened whenever the government allows the retailer to apply an entrance fee to the suppliers, or/and per-quantity sales subsidies (doing the opposite to usual Russian regulation)

Trade Patterns and Export Pricing Under Non-CES Preferences

We develop a two-factor, two-sector trade model of monopolistic competition with variable elasticity of substitution. Firm profit and firm size may increase or decrease with market integration depending on the degree of asymmetry between countries. The country in which capital is relatively abundant is a net exporter of the manufactured good, while both firms' size and profits are lower in this country than in the country where capital is relatively scarce. By contrast, the pricing policy adopted by firms does not depend on capital endowment and country asymmetry. It is determined by the nature of preferences: when demand elasticity increases (decreases) with consumption, firms practice dumping (reverse-dumping)