interfering with secondary markets we present a model to address in a unified manner four ways in which a monopolist can interfere with secondary markets in the model consumers have heterogeneous valuations for quality so that used good markets play an allocative role our results are the following 1 in contrast to swan s famous independence result a monopolist does not provide socially optimal durability 2 allowing the monopolist to rent does not restore socially optimal durability and increases the monopolist s market power in the used market however forcing the monopolist to sell the goods may be a bad policy because it would lead to either lower output or lower durability 3 the manufacturer benefits from a well functioning used good market despite the fact that used goods provide competition for new goods 4 the monopolist prefers to restrict consumers abilities to maintain the good

the role and growth of new car leasing theory and evidence abstractthere has been substantial growth in rates of new car leasing over the last few decades building on recent theoretical research we construct a model of the leasing decision in which leasing mitigates adverse selection and reduces transaction costs but moral hazard limits its use in our model the prevalence of leasing is related to new car reliability which suggests that the recent growth in leasing is at least partly due to improvements in new car reliability we use this model to derive testable implications and then conduct an empirical analysis to investigate whether the operation of the new and used car markets is consistent with the predictions of this theoretical approach our empirical results support the theoretical predictions of our model in particular we provide direct evidence that leasing mitigates adverse selection and that an important factor in the growth in new car leasing rates has indeed been the growth of new car reliability

durable goods monopolists durable goods monopolists face special problems because the sale of their products creates a secondhand market not controlled by the monopolist to the extent the monopolist is able to rent his product rather than sell it or to make binding promises about his future production such problems are ameliorated given the inability to do the above the monopolist is led to producing goods less durable than those produced by either competitive firms or monopolist returns a reverse averch johnson result that monopolist sellers may invest less in fixed costs including plant modernization and research and development than would the renters is shown it is also shown that even though sellers have less monopoly power than renters and nondurable goods monopolists it is possible that the seller will cause a greater deadweight loss than the other types of monopolies

determinants of corporate leasing policy the existing finance literature assumes the real operating cash flows from leasing or owning are invariant to the ownership of the asset and focuses on tax related incentives for corporate leasing policy our analysis suggests that taxes are important in identifying potential lessees and lessors but are less important in identifying the specific assets leased we provide a unified analysis of the various incentives affecting the lease versuspurchase decision we then show how these incentives explain the use of contractual provisions such as maintenance clauses deposits options to purchase the asset and metering when a firm buys an asset it obtains both the right to the services of that asset over the period it is owned plus the right to sell the asset at any future date with a lease the firm acquires only the right to the asset s services for a period specified in the contract the existing finance literature analyzing corporate leasing policy concentrates on the tax related incentives to lease or buy e g see miller and upton 19 myers et al 21 lewellen et al 13 franks and hodges 11 and brealey and young 4 we believe that taxes play an important role in explaining certain dimensions of leasing policy for example the choice between manufacturer and third party leasing however taxes provide only a limited explanation of why specific assets are leased rather than owned and for the choice of provisions in lease contracts in this paper we want to accomplish two things 1 to provide a unified analysis of the various incentives affecting the lease versus buy decision and 2 to employ that analysis to explain observed variation in corporate leasing policy in deriving testable hypotheses about the characteristics of lessees lessors the assets leased and provisions in lease contracts we extend the standard leaseversus buy analysis found in corporate finance textbooks e g brealey and myers

competition marginal cost tariffs and spot pricing in the chilean electric power sector abstract setting up competitiveness and privatizing the power sector has been an important goal of chilean energy policy since 1974 the new organization of the electric sector includes deconcentration of generating and distributing companies a new marginal cost and spot pricing system coordination of generating companies through an economic load dispatching centre eldc and a scheme for sharing transmission lines this paper describes why and how those tasks were carried out in chile

marginal pricing and supplement cost allocation in transmission open access the application of marginal costing to transmission pricing in open access schemes requires the collection of a supplement to finance the transmission systems the paper describes the application of marginal cost based pricing in the chilean power system and the difficulties faced in allocating the supplement among parties involved alternative methods for defining the allocation are formulated generalized generation and load distribution factors for cost allocation are formulated and implemented the methods are applied to allocate payments for transmission services provided by the transmission network and by a distribution company

a multiyear dynamic approach for transmission expansion planning and long term marginal costs computation this paper presents a multicriteria formulation for multiyear dynamic transmission expansion planning problems this formulation considers three criteria investment costs operation costs and the expected energy not supplied the solution algorithm adopts an interactive decision making approach that starts at a nondominated solution of the problem this solution is identified transforming two of the three criteria in constraints specifying aspiration levels and using afterwards simulated annealing to deal with the integer nature of investment decisions after obtaining this first solution the decision maker can alter the aspiration levels and run the application again to obtain a new solution once an expansion plan is accepted the algorithm computes long term marginal costs reflecting both investment and operation costs these costs are more stable than short term ones and inherently address the revenue reconciliation problem well known in short term approaches the developed algorithm is tested using a case study based on the portuguese 400 220 150 kv transmission network

leasing lemons and buybacks in his seminal article of 1970 akerlof argued that the used car market is not efficient because adverse selection causes too little trade we construct a competitive model of the new and used car markets and investigate the relationship between new car leasing and adverse selection our analysis yields a number of interesting results including that new car leasing reduces the adverse selection problem and that buybacks also increase efficiency in the secondhand market we also discuss alternative explanations for new car leasing and an explanation for the growth in new car leasing during the last fifteen years copyright 2003 by the rand corporation

competition in durable goods markets the strategic consequences of leasing and selling in marketing durable goods manufacturers use varying degrees of leasing and selling to consumers e g cars photo copiers personal computers airplanes etc the question that this raises is whether the distinction between leases and sales is simply one of price or whether the proportion of leases and sales effects a firm s ability to compete in the market in this paper we use two approaches to argue that leasing and selling create strategic consequences that extend beyond prices first we develop a stylized theoretical model that shows that the optimal proportion of leases and sales depends on the competitiveness of the market and on the inherent reliability of the firm s product and second we find support for the implications of our theoretical model with data from the automobile industry the u s automobile industry has seen a large increase in leasing over the last five years however the extent to which leasing has been embraced varies widely across manufacturers for example in 1993 the sport utility segment had the following lease percentages ford explorer 29 jeep grand cherokee 24 toyota 4 runner 11 and chevrolet blazer 9 in addition manufacturers often vary lease percentages across models for example in 1993 ford leased 22 of its crown victoria model 35 of its taurus model and 42 of its probe model a popular argument for why we see these differences is that higher priced cars are leased more often because leasing makes them more affordable however this rationale is not compelling in the face of our data for example the ford probe was priced significantly lower than the crown victoria and yet it was leased almost twice as often to develop a better understanding of why we observe differences in the proportion of leasing we develop a two period model of a duopoly in which each manufacturer chooses its optimal quantity and the fraction of units it wants to lease we find that in equilibrium neither firm leases all its units either they use a mix of leasing and selling or they use only selling our analysis suggests that the fraction of leased cars decreases as the manufacturers products become more similar and the competition between them increases the intuition for this result is that a higher fraction of leases puts the firm at a competitive disadvantage in the future this occurs because unlike firms that sell their product firms that lease are at a price disadvantage another important finding in this paper is that the extent of leasing chosen by a manufacturer depends on the reliability of its product in particular all else being equal the lower a product s reliability the lower its proportion of leases within the context of the automobile industry this suggests that more expensive cars may be leased more often because they are of higher quality and not necessarily because they are more expensive finally we test the implications of our theoretical model with data from the u s automobile market in particular for 1993 model year cars we develop a measure of reliability using data from consumer reports in addition we develop a measure of the extent of competition in each segment of the automobile market we support our hypotheses by finding that the extent to which a car model is leased depends strongly on its predicted reliability and on the competitive intensity within the segment

a direct test of the lemons model the market for used pickup trucks of the implications of models of markets with asymmetric information in the seminal paper on markets with asymmetric information george akerlof 1970 pointed out two possible outcomes that may occur where sellers have better information about the quality of products than do buyers one possibility is that bad products will drive out good products if buyers cannot distinguish quality until after the purchase has been made there will be no incentive for sellers to provide good quality products and the average quality in the market will decline in the case of cars an often cited example of this phenomenon owners who discover that they have a lemon will attempt to sell it in the used car market to an unsuspecting buyer the owner of a creampuff will not sell his car since it is indistinguishable from a lemon to buyers and must therefore sell for the price of a car of average quality the effect of quality uncertainty is to reduce the volume of transactions in the used car market below the socially optimal level a second possibility suggested by akerlof is that institutions may develop to counteract the effects of quality uncertainty warranties and brand names can be used to give the buyer some assurance of quality these institutions may prevent good products from being driven from the market but they will

are lemons really hot potatoes abstract we model the hazard rate for car ownership spells our model allows us to distinguish among different types of adverse selection effects by observing the type of unobserved heterogeneity across owners of the same car our empirical results strongly suggest that there is a lemons effect because there is significant unobserved heterogeneity however they also suggest that the lemons effect is caused by the first owner rather than the manufacturer had the manufacturer created the lemon the unobserved heterogeneity would be positively correlated over all owners of a given car instead we observe a negative correlation between the unobserved heterogeneity term for the first owner and the unobserved heterogeneity term for subsequent owners

an economic theory of planned obsolescence planned obsolescence is the production of goods with uneconomically short useful lives so that customers will have to make repeat purchases however rational customers will pay for only the present value of the future services of a product therefore profit maximization seemingly implies producing any given flow of services as cheaply as possible with production involving efficient useful lives this paper shows why this analysis is incomplete and therefore incorrect monopolists are shown to desire uneconomically short useful lives for their goods oligopolists have the monopolist s incentive for short lives as well as a second incentive that may either increase or decrease their chosen durability however oligopolists can generally gain by colluding to reduce durability and increase rentals relative to sales some evidence is presented that appears to be generally consistent with the predictions of the theory

reputation in bargaining and durable goods monopoly this paper analyzes durable goods monopoly in an infinite horizon discrete time game we prove that as the time interval between successive offers approaches zero all seller payoffs between zero and static monopoly profits are supported by subgame perfect equilibria this reverses a well known conjecture of coase alternatively one can interpret the model as a sequential bargaining game with one sided incomplete information in which an uninformed seller makes all the offers our folk theorem for seller payoffs equally applies to the set of sequential equilibria of this bargaining game

leasing lemons and moral hazard abstract a number of recent papers have analyzed leasing in the new car market as a response to the adverse selection problem in the used car market originally explored in the seminal 1970 paper by george akerlof in this paper we consider a model characterized by both adverse selection as in these earlier papers and moral hazard concerning the maintenance choices of new car drivers we show that this approach provides explanations for a number of empirical findings concerning real world new and used car markets including that leasing has become more popular over time very high income new car drivers lease more and used cars that were leased when new sell for more than used cars that were purchased when new we also compare and contrast our approach to new car leasing with alternative approaches

a new perspective on planned obsolescence automobile manufacturers have long had a policy of introducing annual style changes into their new model cars textbook publishers have a policy of periodically bringing out revised editions of their popular books recently ibm changed the operating system used in its personal computers causing a reduction in the compatibility between its old and new machines if one were to ask the typical man in the street to explain what is happening in these markets he would not hesitate before giving the following answer in economists terminology he would say that for the above firms the incentive to introduce new products that make old units obsolete is too high i e the firms have an incentive to practice planned obsolescence of course just as is true for the man in the street economists have also long observed and commented on the speed with which new products are introduced for example galbraith 1958 suggests that the annual model changes of automobile manufacturers are socially wasteful while fisher griliches and kaysen 1962 provide empirical estimates of the costs of these changes there have also been numerous theoretical attempts to model the idea of planned obsolescence or the related idea of killing off the market for secondhand goods but most of these models have in fact considered the choice a monopolist faces concerning how much durability to build initially into his product rather than the monopolist s incentive to introduce new versions of his product over time 1 in this paper i consider planned obsolescence from the standpoint of a firm that can change the nature of what it sells and show that the man in the street is in fact correct in many settings the incentive for a durable goods monopolist to introduce new products that make old units obsolete will be above that which is socially optimal

economically adapted transmission systems in open access schemes application of genetic algorithms a dynamic transmission planning methodology using a genetic algorithm is formulated for the purpose of determining an economically adapted electric transmission system in a deregulated open access environment transmission investment sensitivity information linked to short term marginal income is used a computer program is developed and applied to obtain a long range adapted transmission grid for the chilean electrical system two open access pricing methodologies are evaluated in a spot price framework as applied to the adapted grid over the time horizon

the long term impact of transmission pricing transmission pricing has been one of the major issues on the ongoing debate about deregulation and privatization many papers have dealt with the static nature of the tariff using the incremental and the embedded cost approaches however few of them have focused on the dynamic aspects of the tariff and therefore on its impact on the long term expansion planning of both generation and transmission the main target of this paper is to address some interesting topics about the effect of the transmission pricing methods on system cost in this new environment where generation is treated as an open market and transmission as a monopoly some examples with the brazilian power system illustrate the main points shown in this paper

the market for used cars new evidence of the lemons phenomenon the lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an information advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles owners of bad cars try to sell them to ill informed buyers while owners of good cars hold on to theirs consequently the quality of traded automobiles tends to be sub average in contrast to previous empirical work the following article investigates the behaviour of both buyers and sellers testing for adverse selection by sellers and for quality uncertainty among buyers with a sample consisting of all 1985 cars registered in the swiss canton of basle city over the period 1985 to 1991 our data supports both adverse selection and buyer uncertainty suggesting that a lemons problem exists

adverse selection in the used car market evidence from purchase and repair patterns in the consumer expenditure survey we analyze adverse selection in the used car market using a new approach that considers a car as an assemblage of parts some with symmetric information and others with asymmetric information using data from the consumer expenditure survey and consumer reports we examine turnover and repair patterns we find evidence of adverse selection due to the conditions of the transmission engine and during colder months air conditioning and sorting due to the conditions of the vehicle body and during warmer months air conditioning our quantification exercises indicate that adverse selection may have a meaningful effect on trade volume and quality in the secondhand market

turnover of used durables in a stationary equilibrium are older goods traded more this paper develops a dynamic model with transaction costs to determine the equilibrium resale pattern in a market for a durable good the key result is that the probability of resale is nonmonotonic in the age of the good trade volume is relatively low in the very beginning and in the middle of a good s life this result helps explain observed variations of resale rates across vintages for the u s market of used cars

moral hazard in leasing contracts evidence from the new york city taxi industry abstractin this study i investigate the effects of moral hazard in leasing contracts by examining the driving outcomes of all long term lessees and owner operators of new york city taxis i find that moral hazard explains a sizable fraction of lessees accidents driving violations and vehicle inspection failures to address the possibility of endogenous contract choice i conduct an instrumental variables analysis of the cross section of all drivers and a panel data analysis of a subset of drivers who switched from leasing to owning

solving the revenue reconciliation problem of distribution network providers using long term marginal prices in this paper the authors describe an integrated methodology to compute long term marginal prices in distribution networks long term marginal prices are considered the most interesting and economically sound way of allocating network costs to users additionally they inherently deal with the revenue reconciliation problem as they generally do not require other large supplementary tariff terms the proposed methodology uses fuzzy sets to model uncertainties in load forecasts and considers several criteria to guide the identification of solutions at the end there is a final decision making step to select the most adequate expansion plan according to the preferences of the decision maker

lease valuation when taxable earnings are a scarce resource in this paper we examine leasing as a tax arbitrage instrument analysis of a sample of uk leases presented in this paper suggests that lessors earn large positive npvs our theoretical model seeks to explain these positive npvs in terms of a market price for a scarce resource that we identify as scarce taxable earnings using these prices the model permits a lessor to determine whether the profitability of a proposed set of lease contracts can be improved by writing e different set of contracts that makes better use of the lessor s taxable earnings there may be two reasons why an initial portfolio of contracts may be suboptimal either there may be clienteles or the leasing market may be inefficient subsequently we discuss reasons why the leasing market may be characterized by clienteles and using two different samples of leases we test whether the leasing market is segmented and efficient in this paper we examine leasing as a tax arbitrage instrument with asymmetrical tax positions between lessors and lessees there will be positive net present values npvs to lease transactions see myers dill and bautista 21 analysis of a sample of united kingdom uk leases presented in this paper suggests that lessors earn large positive npvs our theoretical model seeks to explain these positive npvs in terms of a market price for a scarce resource that we identify as scarce taxable earnings there are two implications of our model one for financial intermediaries that act as lessors and the other for financial economists interested in the leasing market the model permits a lessor to determine whether the profitability of a proposed set of lease contracts can be improved upon by writing a different set of contracts that makes better use of the lessor s taxable earnings there may be two reasons why an initial portfolio of contracts that a lessor is about to write may be suboptimal either there may be clienteles because the leasing market

durable good monopolies with rational expectations and replacement sales a monopoly producer of a durable good is examined under the previously uninvoked assumption that the good depreciates and hence that replacement sales must occur if a fixed stock of the good is to be maintained we find two ways in which the no depreciation result that the monopoly will always at least eventually produce a stock equal to that produced by a competitive market may not hold if the length of the trading period is nonzero the limiting stock produced by the firm will be lower than the competitive stock to ensure the profitability of future replacement sales if the firm is able to constrain its production capacity it may choose a constraint that always binds in the sense that it will be impossible for the firm to achieve a stock equal to the competitive stock

eliminating the market for secondhand goods an alternative explanation for leasing there are a number of prominent specific instances in which a durable goods manufacturer with significant market power employed a lease only policy i united shoe in the market for shoe machinery ii ibm in the market for computers and iii xerox in the market for copiers the obvious question that arises is why would such a firm prefer leasing over selling in this article i argue that one role of the lease only policy was to eliminate the market for secondhand goods the article formally demonstrates the argument discusses the relationship between this article and earlier literature on secondhand markets and discusses the implications for antitrust policy

the causes of free bank failures a detailed examination abstract in this paper we propose and test a new explanation of bank behavior during the free banking era 1837 1863 arguing against the conventional view that free bank failures were due to wildcat banking we claim they were caused by falling asset prices confronting both explanations with our new and detailed data set developed from state auditor reports we find that the falling asset price explanation of free bank failures explains far more failures than does the wildcatting hypothesis