investment and coordination in oligopolistic industries we examine investment by firms in 24 chemical product industries to determine whether firms invest preemptively to achieve persistent increases in market share or whether there is evidence of behavior to maintain market share the data indicate that investment reduces the probability that rival firms will expand capacity but the effect is temporary large firms tend to maintain market share while smaller firms tend to invest simultaneously with rivals the role of preemptive investment is limited to that of permitting a firm to invest with a lower probability of redundant investment by rivals preemption does not allow a persistent increase in market share but instead acts as a means by which firms may coordinate capacity investment to help avoid episodes of industry overcapacity

on forchheimer s model of dominant firm price leadership abstract we show that in a simple price setting game with one large firm and many small firms the large firm does not accept the role of the price leader

endogenous timing with incomplete information and with observable delay abstract this paper analyzes endogenous timing in a duopoly model with incomplete information firms announce the period in which they will move before choosing an action and are then committed to their choices endogenous stackelberg equilibria with either the informed or the uninformed firm as the stackelberg leader may emerge for most parameters the cournot equilibrium in the first production period results endogenously journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c73 d82 l10

the dynamics pattern of price dispersion in retail fuel markets abstract this paper empirically investigates the dynamics of price dispersion in retail fuel markets as a response to the corresponding wholesale price changes for this purpose we take advantage of a daily dataset of prices fixed by gas stations in two spanish regions it is consistently found that retail price dispersion is temporarily enlarged as a consequence of wholesale price increases while it is reduced due to decreases the presence of asymmetries in the short run dynamics is also revealed the impact of positive changes in the wholesale price is in the first days of adjustment clearly greater the dynamics pattern could be explained at least in part by the faster response of prices in the stations associated with the two vertically integrated companies that have the largest market share i e repsol and cepsa

unions and monopoly profits using cross sectional data for u s manufacturing the author identifies a negative effect of unions on the profits of highly concentrated industries and virtually no effect on the profits of unconcentrated industries the results for concentrated industries are explained in terms of the monopoly model which predicts a negative effect of unions on profits equivalent to the change in employer s surplus the monopoly model also suggests that previous profit studies which omitted the union variable were likely to significantly underestimate the relationship between concentration and profits this prediction is also supported by empirical evidence m sany studies have demonstrated the ability of unions to raise wages above the level of nonunion workers higher union wages in turn may affect the level of prices employment capital intensity productivity and profits recent studies by clark 1982 and freeman 1983 have found significant negative effects of unions on profit rates in the united states using line of business data from 1970 to 1980 for 900 firms clark found a negative effect of unions on the rate of return to capital more specifically the union effects were found to be significantly negative when market shares were low and insignificant when market shares were high according to clark the absence of a union effect in the latter case can be explained by the ability of firms with market power to pass on higher union wages into higher prices 1982 p 47 on the other hand freeman 1983 using data from the survey of manufactures from 1958 to 1976 and the internal revenue service from 1965 to 1976 also found a negative effect of unions on profits contrary to clark s results however the union profit effect was negative only in concentrated industries the point of contention appears to be the role of concentration in determining the union profit effect rather than the overall negative impact of unions the results of clark and freeman are important because previous industrial organization research on profit rates generally ignored unions for instance of the forty six profit studies surveyed by weiss 1974 none included a union variable more recently a profit study in this review by ravenscraft 1983 using high quality line of business data from the federal trade commission also ignored unionization as will be demonstrated the omission of the union variable leads to an understatement of the effect of industrial concentration on profits this means that concentrated industries generate much greater profits than indicated by previous research in order to measure the size of the understatement a new concept employer s surplus is developed which illustrates the theoretical impact of a union wage increase on monopoly profits the empirical estimates of employer s surplus in this paper indicate how monopoly profits are divided between firms and unions most of the data used in this study were obtained from james medoff and charles brown 2 unlike the previous two studies each observation corresponds to a state by two digit sic industry for manufacturing in 1972 because of the large variations in unionization across states this data set offers a useful test of the union profit effect i employer s surplus according to accepted theory the profit maximizing monopolist will employ labor up to the point where the market wage equals the marginal revenue product mrp 3 if for simplicity we assume that all other factors are variable then the mrp curve represents the monopolist s long run demand for labor in the absence of unions employment is determined by the intersection of the mrp curve and nonunion wage wn as pictured in figure 1 if unions raise wages to wa employment will decrease from ln to l with the reducreceived for publication november 28 1983 revision accepted for publication july 6 1984 eastern washington university i am very grateful to dave bunting lisa brown bill dickens claire brown and george strauss for their valuable suggestions on this research this paper is a revised version of chapter 3 from the author s ph d thesis the union impact on profits productivity and prices university of california berkeley 1 see parseley 1980 for a recent review of this literature 2 i would like to thank brown and medoff for making these data available to me 3 marginal revenue product is equal to marginal revenue multiplied by marginal physical product see rees 1979

competition and the cigarette tv advertising ban competition and the cigarette tv advertising ban i introduction whether advertising increases or decreases competition has been debated for decades on one hand kaldor 1949 50 bain 1956 and others argue that advertising reduces competition by enabling the leading firms in an industry to increase product differentiation this lowers the existing elasticity of demand for the firm s output and erects barriers to the entry of new firms into the industry on the other hand telser 1964 nelson 1975 and others argue that advertising increases competition by disseminating information about the price and other product attributes more widely among consumers this increases the demand elasticities facing the existing firms and facilitates the entry of new firms the results of empirical studies of these alternative theories conflict and so the debate continues 1 empirical studies generally focus on large cross sectional industry samples and compare various measures of competition e g profits industrial concentration or market share stability between high advertising consumer goods industries and low advertising producer goods industries the principal drawback of this approach is that one must control for the many differences among industries in addition to advertising which might affect the proxies for competition the present paper takes a different approach to test the same hypotheses the 1970 ban of cigarette advertising on television can be viewed as a quasi experiment i assume that it substantially reduced the efficacy of cigarette advertising whatever its effects on competition and test for these effects by comparing industry performance measures before and after the ban the results on balance indicate that the ban reduced competition in the cigarette industry ii background in 1970 federal legislation was passed banning the advertising of cigarettes on television and radio effective 2 january 1971 the ban was the result of increasing evidence assumulated during the previous two decades regarding the adverse effects of smoking on health and was not related to considerations of industry competition prior to the ban the cigarette industry was a heavy user of television advertising see table i from 1963 to 1970 the industry s television plus radio advertising to sales ratio averaged 7 4 percent 2 the industry s total advertising to sales ratio during this period averaged 9 8 percent which was among the highest of all industries 3 television advertisements accounted for 76 percent of this total in effect the ban forced the industry to drop its principal advertising medium virtually overnight of course the industry could and did substitute advertising in other media for the lost television advertising however during the first five years after the ban increased spending in other media did not offset the elimination of television advertising expenditures consequently the mean total advertising to sales ratio fell to 6 7 percent during 1971 75 4 these advertising substitutes were qualitatively inferior exacerbating the impact of the spending reductions on efficacy advertising intensity did not approach pre ban levels again until 1976 during 1976 80 the advertising to sales ratio averaged 11 0 percent higher than the mean for the pre ban years 1963 70 5 because the substitutes were inferior to television advertisements the increased advertising expenditure per dollar of sales does not mean that the market impact of advertising was necessarily greater than for the pre ban period 6 it should also be noted that the ban did not cause a decline in industry sales it it had this might have generated its own confounding effects on the performance measures analyzed below total cigarette sales rose from about 470 billion units in 1960 to about 533 billion units in 1970 and about 620 billion units in 1980 a 32 percent increase over 1960

optimal coverage for incompletely reliable insurance abstract optimal actuarially fair coverage of insurance subject to default risk can be less or more than full depending upon the relation between the recovery rate under default and a positive trigger level that is independent of the insured s risk preference

the intertemporal stability of the concentration margins relationship using a longitudinal data base we find that there has been a substantial narrowing of the spread between the price cost margins of concentrated and unconcentrated industries including measures of macroeconomic fluctuations into standard price cost margin regressions we find significant differences in cyclical behavior across market structure we also explore a possible explanation unionization for differences in cyclical behavior finally we investigate the degree to which our results are affected by the potential simultaneity of concentration advertising and the price cost margin

endogenous timing in duopoly games stackelberg or cournot equilibria abstract simultaneous versus sequential play is studied in an extended game in a preplay stage players decide whether to select actions in the basic game at the first opportunity or to wait until observing their rivals first period actions in one extended game players first decide when to select actions without committing to actions in the basic game the equilibrium has a simultaneous play subgame unless payoffs in a sequential play subgame pareto dominate those payoffs in another extended game deciding to select at the first turn requires committing to an action both sequential play outcomes are the equilibria only in undominated strategies

unobservable industry characteristics and the innovation concentration advertising maze evidence from an econometric study using panel data for manufacturing industries in the frg 1979 1986 in discussing the nexus between innovations and market structure it is often argued that industry characteristics called opportunities might play an important role as determinants of innovation and that simultaneity rather than one way causality prevails we consider a three equation model for innovation advertising and concentration based on pooled cross section time series data for 26 german manufacturing industries we estimate single equation models with and without fixed industry and or time effects to control for unobservable industry or time effects respectively and simultaneous equation systems including fixed effects and controlling for extreme cases outliers or not furthermore we use two different measures for innovations i e the percentage of shipments due to new products and the percentage of firms which classified themselves as innovators our results can be summarized as follows 1 the firm size has no significant effect on innovation one can therefore not conclude from this data set that large firms are more innovative than small ones 2 unobservable industry effects do matter 3 the treatment of outliers does matter 4 simultaneity does matter 5 the way innovations are measured does matter 6 different stories could be told based on the results of the systems of interdependent equations estimated

first mover disadvantages with private information we consider a leader follower game with output quantities as strategies so as to demonstrate the reduced advantages of the stackleberg leader in a stochastic environment with private information at the equilibrium the strategy of the leader reveals to the follower information about the demand in an attempt to signal low demand the leader contracts his output nevertheless unless the leader s information is infinitely noisy the follower can always correctly infer his signal we find a wide range of parameter values over which the follower is better off compared to the leader

the effect of dynamic competition on price cost margins this paper analyses the intertemporal adjustment process of price cost margins at the four digit standard industrial classification sic industry level our intial analysis shows the assumption that the adjustment process is consistent over all industries is inappropriate while the assumption that the adjustment process is consistent over two digit industries is supported in approximately 31 of the sample industries we proceed to analyse industry specific adjustment parameters and find that 50 of the sample are compatible with a decay of 90 of the supranormal return with four years and 85 of the sample exhibit margins that decay in approximately 10 years further analysis allows us draw some weak conclusions on the determinants of the adjustment parameter we find a change in cocentration high imports a mature market and low research and development expenditures contribute to slightly lower adjustment coefficients and a faster decay of supranormal profits finally the modelling of the adjustment

contract nonperformance risk and uncertainty in insurance markets insurance contracts may fail to perform leading to a default on valid claims we relax the standard assumption of known probabilities for such defaults by allowing for uncertainty within a large behavioral experiment we show that introducing risk and uncertainty each leads to significant reductions in insurance demand and that the effects are comparable in magnitude 17 1 and 14 5 percentage points furthermore risk and ambiguity averse participants are affected most these findings are in line with models incorporating ambiguity attitudes or alternatively pessimistic beliefs an analysis of the belief and decision dynamics suggests persistent pessimistic priors and disregard of peer experiences leading to a stable uncertainty effect

simultaneous and sequential price competition in heterogeneous duopoly markets experimental evidence abstract we investigate simultaneous and sequential price competition in duoply markets with differentiated products and random matching of symmetric firms we find that second movers gain from the sequential structure in comparison to simultaneous move markets whereas first movers do not as predicted by the theory there is a significant first mover disadvantage in the sequential game finally we report the results of control treatments varying the matching scheme and the mode of eliciting choices strategy method vs standard sequential play

endogenous price leadership and the strategic acquisition of information we model a differentiated bertrand duopoly in which a firm s earlier knowledge of market demand than its competitor results in endogenous price leadership with the information advantaged firm leading in such a setting with second mover advantage we then study the firms incentives to acquire information and analyze an information acquisition game both i neither firm acquiring information and ii one firm acquiring information can arise as subgame perfect equilibrium but both firms acquiring information is never an equilibrium outcome even if information is free information may have a negative value if it causes a change in the timing of price competition

profit margins and the business cycle evidence from uk manufacturing firms this paper presents some empirical models of profitability using panel data covering 709 large u k companies ove r the 1970s and 1980s focusing specifically on the role of aggregate demand shocks in shaping firm level profitability in basic regressi ons and in quite complex econometric models the results suggest that firm level profit margins fell heavily during the deep manufacturing recession of the early 1980s and as such are consistent with model s predicting the procyclical nature of profit margins this result hol ds across different product groups producer goods consumer durables a nd nondurables though the timing of the impact of aggregate shocks appears to differ copyright 1993 by blackwell publishing ltd

the union impact on profits evidence from industry price cost margin data this paper uses industry price cost margin data to estimate the extent to which unions reduce profits estimates allowing for the endogeneity of union status are contrasted with estimates that assume union status is exogenous and not determined in part by either profitability or industry structure endogeneity is found to be an important consideration in estimating the union impact on profits two stage estimates are considerably larger than ols estimates the final section explores the total estimated redistribution from capital to labor in the manufacturing sector an important conclusion is that unions raise prices less than was previously believed

endogenous stackelberg leadership abstract we consider a linear quantity setting duopoly game and analyze which of the players will commit when both players have the possibility to do so to that end we study a two stage game in which each player can either commit to a quantity in stage 1 or wait till stage 2 we show that committing is more risky for the high cost firm and that consequently risk dominance considerations as in harsanyi and selten 1988 allow the conclusion that only the low cost firm will choose to commit hence the low cost firm will emerge as the endogenous stackelberg leader journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d43

do you trust your insurer ambiguity about contract nonperformance and optimal insurance demand abstract we study optimal insurance demand for a risk and ambiguity averse consumer under ambiguity about contract nonperformance ambiguity aversion lowers optimal insurance demand and the consumer s degree of ambiguity aversion is negatively associated with the optimal level of coverage a more pessimistic belief and greater ambiguity may increase or decrease the optimal demand for insurance and we determine sufficient conditions for a negative effect we also discuss wealth effects and evaluate the robustness of our results by considering several alternative models of ambiguity aversion our findings show how ambiguity about contract nonperformance can undermine the functioning of insurance markets making it a concern for regulators caution is required though because demand reactions are only imperfectly informative about the welfare effects of ambiguity about contract nonperformance

markup variability and flexibility theory and empirical evidence recent empirical studies have raised serious questions about the basic propositions about the cyclical behavior of prices and markups found in the traditional markup literature the administered price hypothesis and the standard volume target return pricing svtrp and wage cost markup wcm models which provide its theoretical support posit the following 1 the markup over average variable costs avc never declines during the expansion phase of the business cycle 2 in the short run or over the cycle prices and markups are less flexible more stable in highly concentrated industries than in industries of low concentration and 3 in highly concentrated industries prices and markups are insensitive to short run fluctuations in demand conditions and thus are solely determined by cost considerations the first two propositions deal with respectively the qualitative nature of the markup trajectory over the cycle and the relative flexibility of price and markup behavior 2 this paper summarizes and empirically tests an alternative theory of markup pricing it is concluded that over the typical business cycle 1 the markup rises from initial trough until the midexpansion and then declines until the terminal trough and 2 markup flexibility is positively related to the degree of demand competition this cyclical pattern of markup variability is shown to exist in major industry groups for all postwar cycles up to 1980 regression analysis reveals that in highly concentrated industries a positive relation exists between markup flexibility and the level of import competition and a proxy for the elasticity of demand the author is grateful to james r crotty peter t gottschalk william g shepherd and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper 1 see weintraub 1959 chs 4 5 eckstein 1964 p 280 blair 1972 p 477 and weintraub 1978 ch 3 2 these two aspects of markup behavior will be referred to throughout this paper the markup trajectory refers to its dynamic time path over the business cycle its qualitative nature is summarized by its first and second time deriv

location and the multinational enterprise a neglected factor this article first traces the changing world economic scenario for international business over the past two decades and then goes on to examine its implications for the location of foreign direct investment and multinational enterprise activity it suggests that many of the explanations of the 1970s and early 1980s need to be modified as firm specific assets have become mobile across natural boundaries a final section of the article examines the dynamic interface between the value added activities of multinational enterprises in different locations

the dark side of ny lon financial centres and the global financial crisis this paper brings financial centres into the debate on the causes and consequences of the global financial crisis by focusing on new york and london it argues that the degree of commonality comp

intertemporal profit margin variability and market structure in australian manufacturing abstract three distinct hypotheses have been put forward in recent years by caves and yamey qualls and eckard to explain why intertemporal profit margin variability will be linked positively with market concentration using australian data this paper estimates a two equation model in which the dependent variables are average industry profit margins and intertemporal variability in profit margins and the explanatory variables include various indicia of market structure including concentration concentration is found consistently to be a significant positive determinant of variability in margins and the evidence suggests that this is due to the cyclical factors behind quall s explanation

second mover advantage and price leadership in bertrand duopoly we consider the issue of first versus second mover advantage in differentiated product bertrand duopoly with general demand and asymmetric linear costs we generalize existing results for all possible combinations where prices are either strategic substitutes and or complements dispensing with common extraneous and restrictive assumptions we show that a firm with a sufficiently large cost lead over its rival has a first mover advantage for the linear version of the model we invoke a natural endogenous timing scheme coupled with equilibrium selection according to risk dominance the analysis yields as the unique equilibrium outcome sequential play with the low cost firm as leader

foreign trade elasticities and import discipline this paper provides new evidence on the trade as discipline7rsquo hypothesis by considering the determination of price cost margins with a panel of 41 four digit us food manufacturing industries from 1972 to 1987 following the empirical specification suggested by competitive fringe oligopoly models we include estimated domestic demand elasticities and cross price elasticities of import demand as explanatory variables and the empirical results confirm the importance of these variables in assessing the hypothesis

business cycles and the relationship between concentration and price cost margins using a newly constructed panel data base we examine changes in price cost margins in 284 manufacturing industries between 1958 and 1981 a key finding is a dramatic narrowing of the spread between the margins of concentrated and unconcentrated industries over this period we provide evidence that this narrowing is a result of the greater sensitivity of price cost margins in more concentrated industries to demand fluctuations this finding is robust to the inclusion of other industry variables and to measures of import competition the results indicate that cross sectional estimates of the concentration margins relationship are likely to be both biased and misleading

endogenizing leadership in tax competition abstract in this paper we extend the standard approach of horizontal tax competition by endogenizing the timing of decisions made by the competing jurisdictions following the literature on the endogenous timing in duopoly games we consider a pre play stage where jurisdictions commit themselves to move early or late i e to fix their tax rate at a first or second stage we highlight that at least one jurisdiction experiments a second mover advantage we show that the subgame perfect equilibria spes correspond to the two stackelberg situations yielding to a coordination problem in order to solve this issue we consider a quadratic specification of the production function and we use two criteria of selection pareto dominance and risk dominance we emphasize that at the risk dominant equilibrium the less productive or smaller jurisdiction leads and hence loses the second mover advantage if asymmetry among jurisdictions is sufficient pareto dominance reinforces risk dominance in selecting the same spe three results may be deduced from our analysis i the downward pressure on tax rates is less severe than predicted ii the smaller jurisdiction leads iii the big country higher tax rate rule does not always hold

stackelberg versus cournot equilibrium we reconsider stackelberg s classical critique of the cournot duopoly in the framework of endogenous timing for two player games for quantity duopoly we provide different sets of minimal conditions directly on the demand and cost functions yielding respectively the simultaneous and the two sequential modes of play while our findings essentially confirm the predominance of the former they also indicate that the latter is natural under some robust but restrictive conditions no extraneous assumptions such as concavity existence or uniqueness of equilibria are needed and the analysis makes crucial use of the basic results from the theory of supermodular games classification numbers b21 c72 d43 l13 c 1999 academic press

new frontiers in international strategy this paper studies a new frontier in the understanding of international strategy is to explore it we propose the analogy of the ecology of firms and places as a way to emphasize that the real problem is the colocation of different places with different types of firms locations are in fact the distinctive content of international business strategy we deal with this problem with four different perspectives first differences across countries must be addressed with integrative frameworks able to represent the multidimensionality of semiglobalization or intermediate states between total localization and total integration second differences in the development of intermediary markets in a particular place influence firm positioning and industry structure in that place but their impact also crosses different places and it is endogenous to the ecology of places and firms in a systemic integrative way that makes simplifications extremely risky in the design of competitive strategy in an international context third places firms and strategies form a complex ecology that can be studied with a framework focused in understanding the geography strategy link that incorporates different levels of analysis new economic actors and a set of primitives finally firms around the ecology of places face the challenge of developing strategies and business models to serve the majority of humanity today excluded from world trade it is a fundamentally different way to think about the ecology of places and firms overall we present an intriguing new frontier with the capacity to impact both research and practice in the field of international strategy based in understanding the interplay among firms and places

a note on insurance coverage in incomplete markets in this paper full insurance coverage on average is defined as the coinsurance rate that eliminates all insurable risk when the uninsurable risk is evaluated at its mean the regressibility assumption is used to derive the conditions on the correlation between background and insurable risks and the actuarial unfairness of insurance under which full over or underinsurance on average is optimal these conditions are compared to those for the case of default risk together they explain intuitively the different results under the cases of background risk and default risk obtained in the literature

in pursuit of monopoly power recent quantitative work in industrial economics this paper reviews empirical work in industrial organization devoted to the question of inferring the existence of monopoly power from data on observed market outcomes like profits and prices the discussion covers inter industry work long conventional in the area newer developments in intra industry analysis and case studies and concludes with some remarks on a small but growing body of work assessing market dynamics the wide range of studies reviewed all generally reveal that market power exists in many industries

information value under demand uncertainty and endogenous market leadership in an oligopoly model with firms choosing to produce in one of two periods we identify the circumstance under which a firm s having early information regarding stochastic demand results in market leadership high demand volatility leads to stackelberg competition with the information advantaged firm leading in the n firm case an equilibrium with multiple leaders and multiple followers emerges endogenously in a duopoly information acquisition game we identify conditions that determine whether neither one or both firms will pay to acquire early information and note that one firm s obtaining early information may generate a positive externality benefitting its competitor both symmetric and asymmetric outcomes are possible and stackelberg market leadership may occur in equilibrium but only when firms have different costs of information our finding that an information advantage may convey leadership which then affects the value of information to the players applies to other settings exhibiting first mover advantage such as certain public good provision games jel c72 d82 l13

firm market share price flexibility and imperfect information this paper argues that firms with larger market shares will be relatively better informed about demand conditions the main implications are 1 more rapid price adjustments in concentrated industries 2 price leadership in industries with dominant firms and 3 price setting behavior by the concentrated side of the market

risk aversion and the propensities for self insurance and self protection for a risk averse individual the methods for reducing the expected financial impact of a loss include reducing the severity of any loss that occurs self insurance and reducing the probability of the occurrence of a loss self protection the literature on this topic has pointed to several anomalies whereby the use of self protection and self insurance yield quite unsimilar results for example ehrlich and becker 5 show that self insurance is always a substitute for market insurance an insurance company s indemnifying a loss whereas self protection and market insurance might be complements dionne and eeckhoudt 4 show that a more risk averse consumer would always invest more in self insurance activities but not necessarily more in self protection activities they argue 4 42 that this result is counterintuitive and provides an exception to the widely accepted result that increased risk aversion reduces risky activities ehrlich and becker 5 639 argue that the incentive to self protect is not so dependent on attitude towards risk both of the above papers seem to take for granted that self protection activities reduce the riskiness of the final wealth distribution however as we argue below this is not the case if riskiness is defined as in rothschild and stiglitz 14 even if we use the variance as our risk measure we do not always reduce risk via self protection dionne and eeckhoudt suggest that these results might not be robust enough to extend to models that incorporate random initial wealth risk and state dependent preferences we show that the model seems to be very robust we also explain why self protection is not at all an exception to the long standing result of arrow 1 whereby more risk averse individuals undertake a lower

asymmetric information acquisition and behavior in role choice models an endogenously generated signaling game the authors employ a static homogeneous good duopoly model wherein firms can choose to produce in one of two periods the model allows agents to acquire information and then traces the impact of the information pattern on subsequent production behavior asymmetric information acquisition leads to a unique production role choice pattern the informed uninformed firm chooses to assume the leader s follower s role moreover if information is costly the typical equilibrium involves only one firm acquiring information thus identical firms with identical opportunities choose to become asymmetrically informed and produce sequentially this is the unique refined equilibrium outcome copyright 1994 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

endogenous price leadership we consider a linear price setting duopoly game with differentiated products and determine endogenously which of the players will lead and which one will follow while the follower role is most attractive for each firm we show that waiting is more risky for the low cost firm so that consequently risk dominance considerations as in harsanyi and selten a general theory of equilibrium selection in games mit press cambridge ma 1988 allow the conclusion that only the high cost firm will choose to wait hence the low cost firm will emerge as the endogenous price leader

endogenous markups intensity of competition and persistence of business cycles in order to study the propagation mechanism of business cycles in particular to investigate how the intensity of competition affects market structure and output persistence over business cycles this paper presents a real business cycle model with imperfect competition and increasing returns to scale this analysis considers the markups of price over cost to be endogenous with endogenous markups two standard forms of oligopolistic competition bertrand and cournot are considered results show that 1 the propagation mechanism in the sense of output persistence is greater under cournot 2 the propagation mechanism is unequivocally greater with imperfect competition regardless of whether markups are endogenous or not and 3 under imperfect competition the propagation mechanism is greater with endogenous markups than with exogenous markups overall these results suggest that more intense competition produces lower persistence in output growth and thus a weaker propagation mechanism in a calibration exercise these differences were also found to be quantitatively important

rational insurance purchasing consideration of contract nonperformance much of the analysis of rational insurance purchasing and hedging strategies has been undertaken on the basis of the expected utility hypothesis this decision framework has been used to reformulate the bernoulli principle that a risk averter rationally would fully insure at a fair premium other applications include the analysis of insurance at unfair premiums mossin 1968 and smith 1968 the effects of state dependent utility on the rational insurance purchase cook and graham 1977 the effects of risky background wealth doherty and schlesinger 1983 and mayers and smith 1983 and the design of the optimal insurance policy raviv 1979 such analyses have been conducted on the assumption that insurance policies are free of insolvency default risk this assumption stands in sharp contrast to the actuarial literature in which the insolvency risk or probability of ruin is a central focus of attention

cost of delay and endogenous price leadership abstract we study the effects of discounting in a standard endogenous price leadership model we show that there will be occasional changes in the identity of the leader with any cost of delay or discounting however small by analyzing the incentives that induce a firm to take up the leader position we derive positive predictions about which firm will lead most price changes firms with shorter reaction times will be more likely to become the price leader as will firms with lower cost of delay if the firms reaction times are similar

the cyclical behaviour of manufacturing prices in a small open economy this paper presents a disaggregated regression study of the cyclicality of the mark up over costs in belgian manufacturing industry this is found to be low reflecting a great reluctance on the part of price setters to adjust prices to uncertain market signals this appears to be especially the case for exporters when compared with firms active on the domestic market exporters face greater uncertainty because their competitors are less well known and their market shares tend to be smaller implying a higher variance of industry sales estimates

corporate social responsibility or payoff asymmetry a study of an endogenous timing game we revisit an endogenous timing game by introducing corporate social responsibility into firms payoffs previous research investigates an endogenous timing game in a mixed oligopoly wherein one welfare maximizing public firm competes against profit maximizing private firms it shows that the outcome is completely different from that of private oligopoly in contrast to its result we find that this change in payoff does not matter as long as the payoffs are symmetric our result indicates that asymmetry and not welfare concerning objectives yields specific results in the literature on mixed oligopoly

a model of price leadership based on consumer loyalty this paper analyzes a duopolistic price setting game in which firms have loyal consumer segments but cannot distinguish them from price sensitive consumers the authors adapt a variant of h varian s 1980 simultaneous price setting game to analyze price leader equilibria the properties of the price leader equilibria with an exogenously specified leader motivate the construction of a game of timing in which the firm with the larger segment of loyal consumers becomes an endogenous price leader this demonstrates that consumer loyalty may play an important role in establishing the existence and identity of a price leader copyright 1992 by blackwell publishing ltd

determinants of the status of an international financial centre in march 2014 new york overtook london as the number one financial centre in the world as ranked by the global financial centre index gfci this move has raised questions as to what has actually happened to justify such a change in ranking some questions are also raised such as why mauritius is ranked higher than helsinki notwithstanding the problems associated with the gfci as a measure of the status of an international financial centre an attempt is made to identify the determinants of the status of 53 financial centres using 24 potential explanatory variables and the technique of extreme bounds analysis eba the results show that the important determinants include among others the corporate tax rate global competitiveness global credit rating occupancy cost and property rights a policy implication of the results is that attention should be paid to these determinants if a financial centre is to consolidate its position

indirect competition with spatial product differentiation although two markets may appear to be separate sometimes one firm participates in both of them that firm provides a link between the two markets such a straddling firm transmits indirect competition from each market to the other since its actions reflect competitive conditions in both markets in a model of spatial product differentiation the author shows that indirect competition may make a market perform significantly better than the number of firms would indicate moreover total consumer surplus increases if two previously distinct markets are linked by a straddler finally the author considers implications of these results for antitrust analysis copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

implications of incomplete performance for optimal insurance we investigate the demand for insurance when contracts are subject with positive probability to two distinct types of incomplete performance when partial performance means payment of some fraction of the indemnity under full performance the latter exhibits a disappearing deductible when partial performance is due to insufficient financial capacity optimal insurance contracts for any given level of financial capacity offer full marginal coverage above a deductible for either type of non performance the optimal deductible under full performance is positive when insurance is offered at an actuarially fair price

global cities and multinational enterprise location strategy we combine the concept of location derived by economic geographers with theories of the multinational enterprise mne and the liability of foreignness developed by international business scholars to examine the factors that propel mnes toward or away from global cities we argue that three distinctive characteristics of global cities global interconnectedness cosmopolitanism and abundance of advanced producer services help mnes overcome the costs of doing business abroad and we identify the contingencies under which these characteristics combine with firm attributes to exert their strongest influence consistent with these arguments our analysis of a large sample of mne location decisions using a multilevel multinomial model suggests not only that mnes have a strong propensity to locate within global cities but also that these choices are associated with a nuanced interplay of firm and subsidiary level factors including investment motives proprietary capabilities and business strategy our study provides important insights for international business scholars by shedding new light on mne location choices and also contributes to our understanding of economic geography by examining the heterogeneous strategies and capabilities of mnes the primary agents of economic globalization that shape the nature of global cities

does cheaper faster or better imply sooner in the timing of innovation decisions a common myth conception based upon the notion of increasing returns to scale in r d activity is that large firms account for a disproportionate share of innovations in this paper we consider three types of informational returns to scale cheaper faster and better and examine the impact of each on the timing of the firm s innovation decision contrary to popular conception the decision is made later when information is cheaper and the change in timing is unsignable in the case of faster arrival of information only more accurate better information leads to earlier decisions

margins concentration unions and the business cycle theory and evidence for britain abstract a number of recent studies have examined the cyclical relationship between price cost margins concentration and unions u s data has concluded that unions reduce margins margins vary over the cycle and concentration unionisation and the cycle interact in their effect on margins however there is almost no theory to account for these results we propose a simple theory that assumes only that there is overhead labour present at the firm this produces theoretical predictions that can explain these results and discriminate between existing theories we present results of our own using u k panel data and show similar findings to the u s

information and competitive advantage the rise of general motors during the mid 1920s alfred p sloan instituted a number of innovations designed to provide the operating divisions at general motors with more accurate and more timely information regarding final consumer demand these innovations have not received much attention in attempts to explain general motors remarkable rise to dominance of the u s domestic automobile industry the present article reviews these events and provides statistical tests affirming the success of these innovations at the same time as general motors increases in profitability and market share

do markets differ much this essay reports the results of a crosssection study of differences in accounting profitability that sheds light on some basic controversies in industrial economics most previous cross section studies in this field have been concerned with testing hypotheses about structural coefficients in models meant to apply to essentially all markets as we have learned more about the difficulties of constructing such general models and of performing tests on their structural parameters properly structural cross section analysis has fallen out of fashion in contrast to most of the cross section literature the analysis reported here is fundamentally descriptive it does not attempt directly to estimate or to test hypotheses about structural parameters i hope to show by example that one can perform illuminating analysis of cross section data without a host of controversial maintained hypotheses cross section data can yield interesting stylized facts to guide both general theorizing and empirical analysis of specific industries even if they cannot easily support full blown structural estimation one can view the sort of search for stylized facts conducted here as either a replacement for or an input to interindustry structural estimation depending on one s feeling about the long run potential of that research approach this study also departs from much of the cross section literature by being fundamentally concerned with the importance of various effects not just with coefficient signs and t statistics in particular this essay provides estimates of the relative importance of firm market and market share differences in the determination of business unit divisional profitability in u s manufacturing using 1975 data from the line of business program of the u s federal trade commission ftc i find support neither for the existence of firm effects nor for the importance of market share effects moreover while industry effects apparently exist and are important they appear to be negatively correlated with seller concentration in these data section i relates firm market and share effects to current issues and controversies in industrial economics and thus supplies the motivation for our empirical analysis the remainder of the essay treats the data and

location and the multinational enterprise in the early development of the international business field the focus of attention moved from the country level to the firm level and interest in location issues declined more recently firm based research has itself become increasingly concerned with the study of firm location interactions when examining two way knowledge flows or spillovers between multinational enterprises mnes and other actors in specific locations the diversity or heterogeneity of firms matters as does the diversity of locational environments the localization of knowledge sources depends on mne group level strategies for growth and organizational decentralization on subsidiary level evolution towards local competence creating efforts and on the development of suitable business networks within locations mnes now have a greater potential to benefit from a synergistic locational portfolio of complementary sources of knowledge the locational composition of the international network for knowledge sourcing of a given mne depends upon the extent of institutional compatibility between the locations in which the mne is active this compatibility between locations in turn affects the capacity of the mne to become an insider in local business systems and to influence the local institutional environment

do unions capture monopoly profits this paper challenges the conclusion reached in recent studies that unions reduce profits exclusively in highly concentrated industries from their review of previous studies and their analysis of 1977 data on 367 fortune 500 firms the authors conclude that there is no convincing evidence that concentration produces monopoly profits for unions to capture moreover they find that the union wage effect is not greater in concentrated industries as suggested by the hypothesis that unions capture concentration related profits evidence is found suggesting that a firm s market share its expenditures on research and development and its protection from foreign competition provide more likely sources for union rents than does industry concentration several recent studies have found that unions reduce profits significantly and some have concluded that this profit reduction is restricted to highly concentrated industries both conclusions are important the finding that unions reduce profitability indicates that in general the cost increasing effects of unions outweigh any positive productivity effects they may bring to the workplace such a

the impact of cyclical demand movements on collusive behavior recent work by rotemberg and saloner 1986 investigates the effect of the business cycle on optimal collusive pricing by specifying that demand is subject to i i d shocks an implication of the i i d assumption is that firms expectations on future demand are unrelated to the current level of demand we put forth a model that allows for both the level of current demand and firms expectations on future demand to change over time thus it captures two important properties of the business cycle our analysis reveals that while the gain to deviating from a collusive agreement is greatest during booms firms find it most difficult to collude during recessions as the forgone profits from inducing a price war are relatively low an implication of this effect for pricing behavior is that at the same level of demand price is lower when demand is declining than when demand is rising consistent with previous theoretical work we find that firms price countercyclically for a range of values for the discount factor however numerical simulations reveal a greater tendency for firms to price countercyclically during recessions than during booms