Price and service competition with maintenance service bundling

In many equipment manufacturing industries, firms compete with each other not only on products price, but also on maintenance service. More and more traditional products oriented firms are offering their customers products bundled with maintenance service (P&S bundles). In this study, we examine firms’ incentive to offer customers products bundling with long-term maintenance or repair support service in a duopoly competitive environment. When providing P&S bundles, a firm need to determine the service level (in terms of average response time guarantee for the service in this paper) to offer and needs to build a service facility to handle the maintenance service requirements. Based on the analysis of three sub-game models, we characterize the market conditions in which only one firm, both firms or neither firm will offer P&S bundles. Finally, we analyze the affects of several market factors on firms’ strategy choices

Childhood health and educational investment under risk

En: IZA Journal of Labor & Development, 6:2. doi: 10.1186/s40175-016-0068-4A huge literature shows that childhood health and educational attainment are highly correlated. However, estimates for the effect of childhood health on educational attainment under risk generally confound the effect of liquidity constraints and of lack of insurance against risk. It is unclear whether the correlation between health and education under uninsured risk would remain if the capital markets were perfect and household faced no liquidity constraints. This paper fills in this lacuna in the literature. We develop a two period model of investment in education when future labor earnings are stochastically dependent on current investments in schooling and health. It is found that when there is uninsured risk, then parental investment in a child’s education will be inefficient even in the presence of perfect capital markets. Under certain assumptions, there will be a positive correlation between childhood health and educational investment. Health inequalities will translate into educational inequalities in an environment of uninsured risk. We are able to show that when perfect insurance markets are present, investments in child health and schooling will be optimal. From the policy perspective, this argues for the development of insurance markets. The results also suggest that policy interventions that target higher levels of educational investment among the population need to account for the effect of childhood differences in health

Discounting Climate Change

* The ideas I apply here were presented in my Plenary Lecture to the World Congress o

Managerial delegation in a dynamic renewable resource oligopoly

I propose a differential oligopoly game of resource extraction under (quasi-static) open-loop and nonlinear feedback strategies, where firms are managerial and two alternative types of delegation contract are considered. Under open-loop information, delegation expands the residual steady state resource stock. Conversely, under nonlinear feedback information the outcome depends on the structure of managerial incentives. If sales are used, once again delegation favours resource preservation. On the contrary, if market shares are included in the delegation contract, this combines with an underlying voracity effect in shrinking the steady state volume of the resource

Spatial resource wars: A two region example

We develop a spatial resource model in continuous time in which two agents strategically exploit a mobile resource in a two-location setup. In order to contrast the overexploitation of the resource (the tragedy of commons) that occurs when the player are free to choose where to fish/hunt/extract/harvest, the regulator can establish a series of spatially structured policies. We compare the three situations in which the regulator: (a) leaves the player free to choose where to harvest; (b) establishes a natural reserve where nobody is allowed to harvest; (c) assigns to each player a specific exclusive location to hunt. We show that when preference parameters dictate a low harvesting intensity, the policies cannot mitigate the overexploitation and in addition they worsen the utilities of the players. Conversely, in a context of harsher harvesting intensity, the intervention can help to safeguard the resource, preventing the extinction and also improving the welfare of both players