Internetmarkten: wie profiteert?

Economen lijken het er over eens dat het internet positieve welvaartseffecten kan hebben. Maar of het werkelijk de mogelijkheden biedt om tot een perfecte markt te komen, blijft de vraag. Werpt het internet geen nieuwe barrières op? En aan wie valt de extra welvaart toe? Over visionairs en technocraten

Two Firms is enough for Competition, but Three or More is better

We present an oligopoly model where a certain fraction of consumers engage in costly non-sequential search to discover prices. There are three distinct price dispersed equilibria characterized by low, moderate and high search intensity, respectively. We show that the effects of an increase in the number of firms active in the market are sensitive (i) to the equilibrium consumers' search intensity, and (ii) to the status quo number of firms. For instance, when consumers search with low intensity, increased competition does not affect expected price, leads to greater price dispersion and welfare declines. In contrast when consumers search with high intensity, increased competition results in lower prices when the number of competitors in the market is low to begin with, but in higher prices when the number of competitors is large. Moreover, duopoly yields identical expected price and price dispersion but higher welfare than an infinite number of firms

Strategic Wage Setting and Coordination Frictions with Multiple Applications

We examine wage competition in a model where identical workers choose the number of jobs to apply for and identical firms simultaneously post a wage. The Nash equilibrium of this game exhibits the following properties: (i) an equilibrium where workers apply for just one job exhibits unemployment and absence of wage dispersion; (ii) an equilibrium where workers apply for two or for more (but not for all) jobs always exhibits wage dispersion and, typically, unemployment; (iii) the equilibrium wage distribution with a higher vacancy-to-unemployment ratio first-order stochastically dominates the wage distribution with a lower level of labor market tightness; (iv) the average wage is non-monotonic in the number of applications; (v) the equilibrium number of applications is non-monotonic in the vacancy-to-unemployment ratio; (vi) a minimum wage increase can be welfare improving because it compresses the wage distribution and reduces the congestion effects cause! d by the socially excessive number of applications; and (vii) the only way to obtain efficiency is to impose a mandatory wage that eliminates wage dispersion altogether

On Mergers in Consumer Search Markets

We study mergers in a market where N firms sell a homogeneous good and consumers search sequentially to discover prices. The main motivation for such an analysis is that mergers generally affect market prices and thereby, in a search environment, the search behavior of consumers. Endogenous changes in consumer search may strengthen, or alternatively, offset the primary effects of a merger. Our main result is that the level of search costs are crucial in determining the incentives of firms to merge and the welfare implications of mergers. When search costs are relatively small, mergers turn out not to be profitable for the merging firms. If search costs are relatively high instead, a merger causes a fall in average price and this triggers search. As a result, non-shoppers who didn’t find it worthwhile to search in the pre-merger situation, start searching post-merger. We show that this change in the search composition of demand makes mergers incentive-compatible for the firms and, in some cases, socially desirable

R&D Networks

Many markets are characterized by a high level of inter-firm collaboration in R&D activity. This paper develops a simple model of strategic networks which captures two distinctive features of such collaboration activity: bilateral agreements and non-exclusive relationships. We study the effects of collaborations on individual R&D effort, cost reduction, and market performance. We then examine the incentives of firms to form collaborative links and the architecture of strategically stable networks. Our analysis highlights the interaction between market competition and R&D network structure. We find that if firms are Cournot competitors then individual R&D effort is declining in the level of collaborative activity. However, cost reduction and social welfare are maximized under an intermediate level of collaboration. In some cases, firms can gain market power, and even induce exit of rival firms, by forming suitable collaboration agreements. Moreover, under certain circumstances, such asymmetric collaboration networks are also strategically stable. By contrast, if firms operate in independent markets then individual R&D effort is increasing in the level of collaborative activity. Cost reduction and social welfare are maximized under the complete network, which is also strategically stable

Dumping in Developing and Transition Economies

We build a simple theoretical model to understand why developing and transition economies have increasingly applied anti-dumping laws. To that end, we investigate the strategic incentives of oligopolistic exporting firms to undertake dumping in these economies. We show that dumping may be due to cross-country differences in income, to the extent of tariff protection and to the exchange rate depreciations observed recently. Dumping may arise even if consumers exhaust all arbitrage possibilities

Trade Policy of Transition Economics

This paper focuses on ignored issues regarding the impact of trade reforms in transition economies. These economies are primarily characterized by a low quality of their products, large depreciations of their currencies, and a high degree of government intervention in economic activity. These elements are embedded in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation and international trade. First, we show that trade liberalization in transition economies reduces the output of local firms. Second, neither free trade nor zero subsidy is optimal. There exists a rationale for infant-industry protection in that a commitment by the government to use a socially optimal trade and industrial policy can release the domestic firm from low-quality production. Since greater profits are derived from high-quality products, this enables local firms to finance productivity and technology improvements. Third, in terms of social welfare, no equivalence result between the effects of exchange rate changes and the optimal trade policy can be obtained

Dumping in a Global World

Anti-dumping actions are now the trade policy of choice of developing and transition economies. To understand why these economies have increasingly applied anti-dumping laws, we build a simple theoretical model of vertical intra-industry trade and investigate the strategic incentives of exporting firms to undertake dumping. We show that the definition of dumping matters. Based on a comparison of low-quality and high-quality prices, only unilateral dumping by the low-quality firm obtains. By contrast, the standard WTO definition leads to either reciprocal or unilateral dumping depending on differences in incomes and on the height of tariff protection and of the exchange rate depreciations

Anti-dumping, Intra-industry Trade and Quality Reversals

We examine an export game where two firms (home and foreign), located in two different countries, produce vertically differentiated products. The foreign firm is the most efficient in terms of R&D costs of quality development and the foreign country is relatively larger and endowed with a relatively higher income. The unique (risk-dominant) Nash equilibrium involves intra-industry trade where the foreign producer manufactures a good of higher quality than the domestic firm. This equilibrium is characterized by unilateral dumping by the foreign firm into the domestic economy. Two instruments of anti-dumping (AD) policy are examined, namely, a price undertaking (PU) and an anti-dumping duty. We show that, when firms' cost asymmetries are low and countries differ substantially in size, a PU leads to a quality reversal in the international market, which gives a rationale for the domestic government to enact AD law. We also establish an equivalence result between the effects of an AD duty and a PU

Consumer Search and Oligopolistic Pricing: An Empirical Investigation

This paper presents an empirical examination of oligopoly pricing and consumer search. The theoretical model allows for sequential and non-sequential search and using the theoretical restrictions firm and consumer behavior impose on the data we study the empirical validity of the models. Two equilibria arise: one with costless search and the other with costly search. We find that the costless search equilibrium works well for products with a relatively low value, and, by implication, a small number of sellers. By contrast, the costly search equilibrium explains the observed data in a manner that is consistent with the underlying theoretical model for almost all products (for 86 out of 87!)