Too Much Information Sharing? Welfare Effects of Sharing Acquired Cost Information in Oligopoly

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists’ information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost parameters gives the following trade-off in Cournot oligopoly. On the one hand, it decreases the expected consumer surplus for a given information precision, as the literature shows. On the other hand, information sharing increases the firms’ incentives to acquire information, and the consumer surplus increases in the precision of the firms’ information. Interestingly, the latter effect may dominate the former effect.Oligopoly, information acquisition, information sharing, Information structures, Consumer surplus

License prices for financially constrained firms

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit service deployment. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of financially constrained bidders. If demand is just slightly elastic, auctions maximize consumer surplus if consumer surplus is a convex function of quantity (a common assumption), or if consumer surplus is concave and the proportion of expenditure spent on deployment is greater than one over the elasticity of demand. The latter condition appears to be true for most of the large telecom auctions in the US and Europe. Thus, even if high auction prices inhibit service deployment, auctions appear to be optimal from the consumers’ point of view

The Estimation of Consumer Surplus Benefits from a City Owned Multipurpose Coliseum Complex

Coliseums can create consumer surplus benefits by providing types of entertainment to local residents that would otherwise not be available to them. This paper estimates consumer surplus for a major City owned entertainment/convention facility, the Greensboro Coliseum Complex (GCC). A novel aspect of this paper is that it estimates the distribution of consumer surplus across households of different income levels as well as aggregate consumer surplus. It is estimated that aggregate consumer surplus from the GCC in 1999 exceeded the public subsidy for this complex, but a disproportionate amount of the consumer surplus benefits go to higher income households.

On the geometry of the consumer's surplus line integral

Consumer's surplus can be seen as a correct measure of the change in welfare under special conditions on the preferences of the consumer. The note addresses the question whether the intuitive appeal of the consumer''s surplus concept in the one-price change case extends into cases where several prices of inter-related goods change. An intuitively justified attribution of the change in welfare is conjectured. Sufficient conditions for this attribution to be exactly consistent with the geometry of the consumer''s surplus line integral are discussed.

On the (Mis-) Alignment of Consumer and Social Welfare in Markets with Network Effects

We analyze duopoly Bertrand competition under network effects. We consider both incompatible and compatible products. Our main result is that network effects create a fundamental conflict between the maximization of social welfare and consumer surplus whenever products are incompatible. While consumer surplus is highest in the symmetric equilibrium, social welfare is highest in the asymmetric equilibrium. We also show that both consumer surplus and social welfare are higher in any equilibrium under compatibility when compared with incompatible products. However, .firms never have strict incentives to achieve compatibility. Finally, we show the robustness of our results when products are horizontally differentiated.Bertrand duopoly, network effects, (In-) compatibility, welfare

License Prices for Financially Constrained Firms

It is often alleged that high auction prices inhibit service deployment. We investigate this claim under the extreme case of financially constrained bidders. If demand is just slightly elastic, auctions maximize consumer surplus if consumer surplus is a convex function of quantity (a common assumption), or if consumer surplus is concave and the proportion of expenditure spent on deployment is greater than one over the elasticity of demand. The latter condition appears to be true for most of the large telecom auctions in the US and Europe. Thus, even if high auction prices inhibit service deployment, auctions appear to be optimal from the consumers' point of view.

THE IMPORTANCE OF FUNCTIONAL FORM IN THE ESTIMATION OF WELFARE

Researchers have recognized the central role that the choice of functional form has on estimated of consumer surplus. The purpose of this paper is to quantify the magnitude of errors which might arise from the use of incorrect functional forms. It describes a simulation experiment where estimated consumer surplus, based on simulated data sets, is compared with consumer surplus computed directly from the simulate data. The errors resulting from the use of mismatching functional forms range from approximately 4% to 107%.Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Consumer Surplus Estimates and the Source of Regression Error

Contrary to widely held belief, we show that the source of regression error does not matter when calculating Marshallian surplus. A misspecified demand curve, not the assumed source of regression error, leads to differences in estimates of consumer surplus.Regression Error, Marshallian Surplus, Welfare Analysis, Consumer/Household Economics, D60, C24, Q51,