transfers to sustain dynamic core theoretic cooperation in international stock pollutant control international environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of countries may attempt to do better for themselves outside of any proposed agreement in a static context it has already been shown that it is possible to achieve stability in the sense of the core of a co operative game by means of appropriately defined transfers between the countries involved however the transboundary pollution problems that are most important are caused by accumulated pollutants so that a dynamic analysis is required this paper provides a transfer scheme that yields a core property in a dynamic context the possibility of computing such transfers numerically is discussed

measuring the impacts of teachers reply abstract rothstein 2017 successfully replicates chetty friedman and rockoff s 2014a b henceforth cfr s results using data from north carolina but raises concerns about cfr s methods we show that rothstein s methodological critiques are invalid by presenting simulations and supplementary empirical evidence which show that i his preferred imputation of missing data generates bias ii his placebo test rejects valid research designs and iii his method of controlling for covariates yields inconsistent estimates of teachers long term effects consistent with the conclusions of bacher hicks kane and staiger 2016 using data from los angeles we conclude that rothstein s replication study ultimately reinforces cfr s methods and results jel h75 i21 j45

teacher quality in educational production tracking decay and student achievement growing concerns over the inadequate achievement of u s students have led to proposals to reward good teachers and penalize or fire bad ones the leading method for assessing teacher quality is value added modeling vam which decomposes students test scores into components attributed to student heterogeneity and to teacher quality implicit in the vam approach are strong assumptions about the nature of the educational production function and the assignment of students to classrooms in this paper i develop falsification tests for three widely used vam specifications based on the idea that future teachers cannot influence students past achievement in da ta from north carolina each of the vams exclusion restrictions are dramatically viola ted in particular these models indicate large effects of 5th grade teachers on 4th grade t est score gains i also find that conventional measures of individual teachers value added fade out very quickly and are at best weakly related to long run effects i discuss implic ations for the use of vams as personnel tools

measuring the impacts of teachers i evaluating bias in teacher value added estimates are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality one reason this question has sparked debate is disagreement about whether value added va measures provide unbiased estimates of teachers causal impacts on student achievement we test for bias in va using previously unobserved parent characteristics and a quasi experimental design based on changes in teaching sta using school district and tax records for more than one million children we nd that va models which control for a student s prior test scores exhibit little bias in forecasting teachers impacts on student achievement although teachers have substantial impacts

monetary policy committees individual and collective reputations this paper looks at the incentives of individual members of a monetary policy committee to gain a reputation for inflationary toughness i show a policy maker can have more or less incentive to build a reputation when part of a group but group policy making leads to higher expected social welfare not publishing individuals votes raises the temptation to inflate and lowers expected social welfare if the culture or rules of a central bank puts more weight on senior policy makers the incentive to build a reputation is greater but expected social welfare may be higher or lower

measuring the impacts of teachers ii teacher value added and student outcomes in adulthood abstract are teachers impacts on students test scores value added a good measure of their quality this question has sparked debate partly because of a lack of evidence on whether high value ad

price setting supergames with capacity constraints this paper examines the role of industry capacity in enforcing collusion in the context of repeated games for a fixed capacity per firm it is shown that changes in the number of firms have a non monotone effect on the best enforceable cartel price this is due to the fact that while an additional firm lowers the share that each of the other firms enjoys at the collusive price it also increases the losses to each firm should the cartel fail

market structure of multi product firms under free entry abstract three sources of advantages to multi product firm are considered economies of scope risk reduction and demand complementarity each source if of sufficient magnitude leads to a market equilibrium dominated by multi product firms as the market becomes sufficiently large the multi product cournot nash model is shown to converge to an efficient outcome

empirical implications of alternative models of firm dynamics abstract this paper considers two models of firm behavior that allow for heterogeneity among firms idiosyncratic or firm specific sources of uncertainty and discrete outcomes exit and or entry both the characteristics of firm level panel data sets and the nature of the questions we characteristically ask of them imply that models with these features are likely to underlie most detailed empirical work on microdata sets the models we consider are a bayesian learning model due to jovanovic 20 and a model of research and exploration due to ericson and pakes 11 the paper provides a simple set of empirical procedures to help determine which if either of these two models might be appropriate for alternative data sets we conclude by checking for the implications of the two models on an eight year panel of wisconsin firms the results indicate that one model is consistent with the data on manufacturing firms while the other is consistent with the data on retail trade journal of economic literature classification numbers c52 l60 l80

dynamic legislative policy making abstract we prove existence of stationary markov perfect equilibria in an infinite horizon model of legislative policy making in which the policy outcome in one period determines the status quo for the next we allow for a multidimensional policy space and arbitrary smooth stage utilities and we assume preferences and the status quo are subject to arbitrarily small shocks we prove that equilibrium continuation values are differentiable and that proposal strategies are continuous almost everywhere we establish upper hemicontinuity of the equilibrium correspondence and we provide weak conditions under which each equilibrium of our model determines an aperiodic transition probability over policies we establish a convergence theorem giving conditions under which the invariant distributions generated by stationary equilibria must be close to the core in a canonical spatial model finally we extend the analysis to sequential move stochastic games and to a version of the model in which the proposer and voting rule are determined by play of a finite perfect information game

imperfect information and dynamic conjectural variations this article analyzes oligopoly interaction in an environment where firms are imperfectly informed about the evolution of the market demand curve the analysis develops a two period cournot framework under the assumptions that demand shifts are positively serially correlated that firms never directly observe the demand curve and that firms never observe the previous quantity decisions of rivals firms do draw inferences about the position of the demand curve from past observations on prices consequently the current output of a firm will influence the current market price which will then influence rivals inferences about future demand the future output decisions of rivals will respond accordingly the theory predicts negative dynamic conjectural variations essentially a firm perceives that an increase in its output will lower the current market clearing price which will cause rival firms to think that the demand curve has shifted down and hence induce them to lower their outputs in the future

the function of authority in transaction cost economics abstract this paper questions the transaction cost characterization of observed authority relations as efficient governance structures various inadequacies in the transaction cost account of work organization and the limits of firm size are traced to its neglect of the possibility that authority may be abused opportunistically this exemplifies a more general propensity in the transaction cost literature that of explaining economic organization in functionalist terms with little attention to the causal mechanisms through which efficient governance structures might actually arise three such mechanisms are considered but none is found to provide an adequate rationale for the imputation of efficiency to observed structures

national systems of biotechnology innovation complex interdependence in the global system this paper explores the relationship between national institutional context and the development of biotechnology in the united states united kingdom japan and germany national patterns in biotechnology r d are linked to the configuration of county specific institutional features into a system of innovation which supports or impedes the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge between the scientific and industrial communities building on this comparative analysis it is argued that the particular characteristics of national systems of biotechnology innovation form the basis for complex interdependence within the global system through international technological cooperation and the cross border adoption and adaptation of institutional forms and practices implications for national technological advantage and the stability of national institutional systems are discussed

contract duration and relationship specific investments empirical evidence from coal markets this paper examines the importance of specific relationship investments in determining the duration of coal contracts negotiated between coal suppliers and electric utilities data for 277 coal contracts are used to perform the analysis the results provide strong support for the view that buyers and sellers make longer commitments to the terms of future trade at the contract execution stage and rely less on repeated bargaining when relationship specific investments are more important

dynamic complexity in duopoly games abstract we discuss the occurrence of periodic and chaotic phenomena in infinite horizon duopoly games where firms maximize their discounted sum of profits and use markov perfect equilibrium strategies in the alternating case their corresponding actions are then constrained orbits of a map similar to a cournot t tonnement we show that any behavior is possible for small discount factors and that one obtains the cournot t tonnement as the discount factor goes to zero in the simultaneous case we show by mean of an example that many cournot t tonnements can be viewed as markov perfect equilibria of an infinite horizon game and that one obtains the nash equilibrium of the static game as the discount parameter goes to zero we are thus led to study in detail the dynamical properties of a cournot t tonnement

strategic investment and conjectural variations abstract this paper analyzes investment decisions under the alternative assumptions of competitive collusive open loop non cooperative and feedback non cooperative behavior steady state capital stocks prices and outputs are obtained and compared the paper shows that one of the linear feedback equilibrium decision rule coefficients is a dynamic version of a contemporaneous conjectural variation the same decision rule coefficients are shown to imply a particular value for the contemporaneous conjecture the implied conjecture embodies subgame perfection and approaches the competitive value as the number of firms in the industry increases

a dynamic oligopoly structural model for the prescription drug market after patent expiration this article incorporates consumer learning and heterogeneity into a dynamic oligopoly model for the prescription drug market in the model both firms and patients need to learn the generic qualities via patients experiences generic firms entry decisions are endogenous but their entry timings depend on a random approval process i apply the model to examine the impact of shortening the expected generic approval time although this policy experiment brings generics to the market sooner it increases a potential entrant s likelihood of entering a crowded market and hence could reduce the total number of generic entrants and consumer welfare

computable markov perfect industry dynamics we provide a general model of dynamic competition in an oligopolistic industry with investment entry andexit toensurethatthereexistsacomputationallytractablemarkov perfectequilibrium we introduce firm heterogeneity in the form of randomly drawn privately known scrap values and setup costs into the model our game of incomplete information always has an equilibrium in cutoff entry exit strategies in contrast the existence of an equilibrium in the ericson and pakes model of industry dynamics requires admissibility of mixed entry exit strategies contrary to the assertion in their article that existing algorithms cannot cope with in addition we provide a condition on the model s primitives that ensures that the equilibrium is in pure investment strategies building on this basic existence result we first show that a symmetric equilibrium exists under appropriate assumptions on the model s primitives second we show that as the distribution of the random scrap values setup costs becomes degenerate equilibria in cutoff entry exit strategies converge to equilibria in mixed entry exit strategies of the game of complete information

endogeneity and simultaneity in competitive pricing and advertising a logit demand analysis in this article we use four data sets to provide a benchmark study of the effects of accounting for endogeneity and simultaneity in estimating marketing mix effects in a logit demand framework we compare the results obtained from accounting for endogeneity only to those from accounting for both endogeneity and simultaneity and in the latter case we allow for more general models of firm behavior to examine the consequences of imposing assumptions about the behavior of firms we find that accounting for both endogeneity and simultaneity not only affects the parameter estimates but also results in efficiency gains that affect the statistical significance of the estimates

effects of rotation scheme on fishing behaviour with price discrimination and limited durability theory and evidence abstract this paper examines how rotation arrangement between two groups of fishers with different institutional arrangements affects fishing behaviour and economic outcomes in a particular economic environment characterised by price discrimination and product durability in one group fishers cooperate and maximise the extraction of rents while members in the second group behave non cooperatively applying a model of alternating duopoly we show that the cooperating group behaves like a price discriminating monopolist and tends to uphold prices when the two groups rotate fishing days the cooperating group tends to produce more which prevents the non cooperating group from unprofitable demand preemption

repeated contests a general parameterization abstract contests often involve players vying for the same prize year after year this paper characterizes equilibrium effort both individual and aggregate in a general parameterization of such repeated contests

dynamic auction environment with subcontracting this article provides evidence on the role of subcontracting in the auction based procurement setting with private cost variability and capacity constraints we demonstrate that subcontracting allows bidders to modify their costs realizations in a given auction as well as to control their future costs by reducing backlog accumulation restricting access to subcontracting raises procurement costs for an individual project by 12 and reduces the number of projects completed in equilibrium by 20 the article explains methodological and market design implications of subcontracting availability

a foundation for markov equilibria in sequential games with finite social memory we study stochastic games with an infinite horizon and sequential moves played by an arbitrary number of players we assume that social memory is finite every player except possibly one is finitely lived and cannot observe events that are sufficiently far back in the past this class of games includes games between a long run player and a sequence of short run players and games with overlapping generations of players an equilibrium is purifiable if some close by behaviour is consistent with equilibrium when agents payoffs in each period are perturbed additively and independently we show that only markov equilibria are purifiable when social memory is finite thus if a game has at most one long run player all purifiable equilibria are markov

institutions supporting technical advance in industry elsewhere 1982 economists beliefs that modern capitalism is a fine innovation generating machine have no intellectual grounding in contemporary neoclassical theory the twin theorems take technologies as given the apparent effectiveness of capitalism in this arena must reside in characteristics and mechanisms other than those featured in the microeconomic theory textbooks in our book we attempt to analyze these it also is true that the capitalist engine is a much more complicated one than many economists seem to think i presently am

the strategic alliance of the biotechnology firm this article applies the relevant theories of firm organization and inter firm relationships in the high tech environment to explain the institutional reasons that firms choose between internal or external approaches particularly this study tries to understand to what extent and in what way strategic alliances have impacts on individual firms organizational structure financial structure and firms activities also it tries to find out what type of firms tend to benefit most from alliances and thus use more inter firm agreements the theoretical findings are that due to liquidity constraint and asymmetric information reasons young research intensive firms need to use more alliances to survive in the fast changing high technology industry the empirical analysis employs 3 year panel data and finds that the results are consistent with the theoretical predictions

optimal policies in a dynamic oligopoly model of international trade abstract the paper generalises the static cournot oligopoly model of international trade to a dynamic context and derives optimal trade policies it is found that an export subsidy is the optimal instrument for intervention by the domestic country when the domestic and foreign firms compete only in a third market when domestic consumption is allowed for the optimal policy is a production subsidy it is found that unlike the static cournot case in the dynamic version the reaction curves of both firms shift when a tax subsidy is imposed

a theory of dynamic oligopoly iii cournot competition abstract we study the markov perfect equilibrium mpe of an alternating move infinite horizon duopoly model where the strategic variable is quantity we exhibit a pair of difference differential equations that when they exist differentiable mpe strategies satisfy for quadratic payoff functions we solve these equations in closed form and demonstrate that the mpe corresponding to the solution is the limit of the finite horizon equilibrium as the horizon tends to infinity we conclude with a discussion of adjustment costs and endogenization of the timing

a transaction costs analysis of innovations in the organization of pharmaceutical r d abstract this paper uses transaction costs economics to analyze the increasing importance of vertical disintegration of r d by large pharmaceutical and chemical firms first it discusses three characteristics of the research based pharmaceutical industry then it shows that market failures related to long term joint venture r d contracts between firms and university laboratories are less significant than appears at first and may account for their striking increase over the past fifteen years

intertemporal price competition with exogenous demand shocks in this paper we show that in a differentiated product market the presence of exogenous demand shocks leads to countercyclical price behavior when firms are committed to prices in the short run

dynamic duopolistic competition with sticky prices the authors study duopolistic competition in a homogeneous good through time under the assumption that its current desirability is an exponentially weighted function of accumulated past consumption this implies that the current price of the good does not decline by as much to accommodate any given level of current consumption our an alysis is conducted in terms of a differential game it is found that the equilibrium price corresponding to the open loop nash equilibriu m strategies approaches the static cournot equilibrium price while th e equilibrium price corresponding to the closed loop nash equilibrium strategies which are subgame perfect approaches a price below it copyright 1987 by the econometric society

guns butter and anarchy a state in the international system implicit in realism must allocate its limited resources between satisfying its intrinsically valued ends and the means of military power i formalize this guns versus butter problem in a simple infinite horizon model in which two states must continually decide how to allocate their resources and whether to attack the other state the analysis establishes sufficient conditions to ensure the existence of an equilibrium in which neither state attacks shows that there is a strictly pareto dominant pair of peaceful equilibrium payoffs characterizes the unique peaceful markov perfect equilibrium that yields them and describes the comparative statics of the equilibrium allocations more broadly the analysis also suggests that the notion of anarchy has little if any substantive significance distinctively related to international politics and that the problem of absolute and relative gains is superfluous

persistency in sticky price models abstract nominal rigidities imply that nominal shocks have an impact effect which may be propagated by standard mechanisms however the nominal adjustment process may in itself be a propagation mechanism causing persistent effects of nominal shocks this may be caused by inertia in nominal wage and price adjustment arising due to input output networks or multiperiod nominal contracting as captured in models with staggered price wage decisions it has recently been contested whether staggering can account for persistency of any quantitative importance this paper reviews the theory and empirical evidence on this issue and it is concluded that staggering may be a quantitative important propagation mechanism

selection on observed and unobserved variables assessing the effectiveness of catholic schools in this paper we measure the effect of catholic high school attendance on educational attainment and test scores because we do not have a good instrumental variable for catholic school attendance we develop new estimation methods based on the idea that the amount of selection on the observed explanatory variables in a model provides a guide to the amount of selection on the unobservables we also propose an informal way to assess selectivity bias based on measuring the ratio of selection on unobservables to selection on observables that would be required if one is to attribute the entire effect of catholic school attendance to selection bias we use our methods to estimate the effect of attending a catholic high school on a variety of outcomes our main conclusion is that catholic high schools substantially increase the probability of graduating from high school and more tentatively attending college we find little evidence of an effect on test scores

strategic incentives in dynamic duopoly abstract we compare steady states of open loop and locally stable markov perfect equilibria mpe in a general symmetric differential game duopoly model with costs of adjustment strategic incentives at the mpe depend on whether an increase in the state variable of a firm hurts or helps the rival and on whether at the mpe there is intertemporal strategic substitutability or complementarity a full characterization is provided in the linear quadratic case then with price competition and costly production adjustment static strategic complementarity turns into intertemporal strategic substitutability and the mpe steady state outcome is more competitive than static bertrand competition

rational conjectures in the theory of oligopoly abstract the paper employs the notion of rational conjectural equilibrium to remove the arbitrary nature of conjectures about rivals reactions which characterises the traditional non cooperative theory of oligopoly a general definition of these equilibria is given and the concept is then applied to a simple duopoly model the standard models of perfect competition monopoly limit price dominant firms are shown to emerge as special cases of rational conjectural equilibria

an alternating move price setting duopoly model with stochastic costs abstract this paper examines an alternating move price setting duopoly model in which marginal costs are stochastic without persistence it is shown that provided marginal costs do not fluctuate excessively equilibria in which firms match the current monopoly price do not exist by contrast equilibria in which firms always match their rival along the equilibrium path do exist in these equilibria deviations off of the equilibrium path result in extended price wars in which firms repeatedly undercut each other finally examples in which such price wars are observed in equilibrium are constructed

investment and market power abstract this paper argues that the degree of market power within an industry is an important determinant of interindustry differences in investment behavior a neoclassical investment model is analyzed to show that market power is positively associated with capital stock flexibility the intuition for the result is that firms adjust their stocks and investment plans quickly in response to new conditions so as to capture the rents asssociated with their market power

markov puppy dogs and related animals abstract it is shown that steady state markov perfect equilibria of discrete time infinite horizon quadratic adjustment cost games differ from equilibria of their infinitely repeated counterpart games with zero adjustment costs even though no adjustment costs are paid in the steady state in contrast to continuous time games the limit of these equilibria as adjustment costs approach zero is the same as the equilibria of their static counterpart games a classification scheme is presented and it is shown that the taxonomy is identical to that of analogous two stage games such as those analyzed by fudenberg and tirole american economic review papers and proceedings 1984 74 361 366 this classification is useful in that it implies that steady state equilibria need not be explicitly calculated to analyze qualitatively the effects of adjustment costs in strategic environments it is also argued that estimated conjectural variations parameters may capture a well defined property of strategic interaction in a dynamic game

aggregate pattern of time dependent adjustment rules i a game theoretic analysis of staggered versus synchronised wage setting this paper studies the benefits of staggered wage setting in reducing strategic conflicts it is shown that when wage setters interact strategically and dynamically they prefer moving alternatingly because by doing so they are able to commit temporarily not to offset the effects of each other s action it is also shown that synchronization represents a better arrangement when agents are able to coordinate these results are consistent with the presence of nonsynchronous and decentralized wage decisions in the united states and the united kingdom and the presence of synchronous bargaining in shunto and coordination in wage determination in japan copyright 1996 by royal economic society

r d cooperation between firms a perceived transaction cost perspective transaction cost is considered as an explanatory variable for the choice between markets and various organizational arrangements for performing some predefined tasks such as engaging in private r d with respect to r d cooperation between firms we show that the perception of high transaction cost is related to certain characteristics of the firm and to the type of r d task we also show a relationship between the perception of transaction cost and the perceived success of the cooperation the analysis sheds light on various determinants of transaction costs

subsidized buyer credits atypical results in strategic trade theory using subsidized buyer credit as a policy tool it is shown that the general result of strategic trade policy namely that by committing itself to an export subsidy any government can favorably change the outcome of the cournot oligopoly does not necessarily hold

comment on what drives bank competition some international evidence the question of bank competition is vitally important for a number of reasons the essential role of bank credit and other financial services as an input in the production of most other goods and services places banks in a unique and influential position such that any allocative inefficiency or other market distortions in banking are almost certain to be felt throughout the economy moreover recent history has provided numerous instances where the textbook paradigm of atomistic competition has proven inadequate as a policy guide for efficient banking either because there are simply too few banks to rely on sheer numbers as a guarantee of vigorous competition as in canada or because of evidence that there can be such a thing as too much competition in banking as suggested by several studies or because of instances where nearly competitive pricing has been observed in markets containing only one or two banks or because conversely substantially noncompetitive pricing has sometimes been deduced in banking products such as credit cardswith thousands of suppliers thus the study of bank competition remains an urgent field of research claessens and laeven 2004 this issue of jmcb make two key contributions here first they extend a proven empirical method to an unprecedentedly large and varied crosscountry sample second they offer the logical and policy relevant additional step of seeking to identify factors associated with variations in measured conduct this step is needed to assess the empirical validity of the traditional structure conductperformance paradigm in their sample and is especially important where that paradigm is found lacking as a predictor of bank conduct indeed although the authors

tirole s industrial regulation and organization legacy in economics jean tirole was awarded the 2014 sveriges riksbank prize in economic sciences in memory of alfred nobel for his analysis of market power and regulation this paper provides an overview of some of that work and of his related contributions to game theory

aggregate pattern of time dependent adjustment rules ii strategic complementarity and endogenous nonsynchronization abstract this paper provides an explanation for an important institutional feature of staggered time dependent adjustment rules assumed in a number of macroeconomic models it identifies strategic complementarity as the crucial factor leading to nonsynchronized decisions in a game theoretic framework the paper first shows that nonsynchronization is the equilibrium outcome in an infinite horizon game in which strategic complementarity is present whether the players choose predetermined or fixed actions by pursuing the interpretation of a nonsynchronized move dynamic game as a series of games with symmetric stackelberg leadership it is further suggested that the relationship between strategic complementarity and the benefit to the stackelberg follower provides the insight to the game theoretic explanation of nonsynchronization the results of this paper reveal a link between strategic complementarity and nonsynchronization two important macroeconomic features journal of economic literature classification numbers e30 l16

the optimal organization of research evidence from eight case studies of pharmaceutical firms abstract in this paper we examine the results of interviews of scientists and executives in eight pharmaceutical companies on the issue of how best to organize the rd when the firm is playing catch up in an area of science where it is weak and when governmental policies force firms to carry out r d in particular locations

more than intent a bundling model of mne sme interactions abstract as a counterpoint to prashantham and birkinshaw i present an alternative model of mne sme cooperation where either type of firms can take the role of content provider or distributor i argue that mnes will interact with smes when there are differences in optimal scale between the content creation and distribution stages of the value chain and it is not feasible or efficient for either party to vertically integrate between these two stages i then build two 2 2 bundling models one in which the sme provides content and the mne distributes it and another with the reverse configuration in these 2 2s the axes are the transactional properties of the two complementary inputs content and distribution that mnes and smes bundle to create value i show that these models can explain the forms taken by mne sme cooperation and their dynamics

competition collusion and chaos abstract in this paper we present results which show that cartel formation can still be observed in a completely deterministic model where myopic firms compete through price in finite time the firms are spatially differentiated and take turns with their neighboring firms in setting prices among the different possible dynamic scenarios we focus attention on those where cooperative and competitive behavior continue to coexist throughout time the continual interaction of cooperative and competitive behavior results in complex dynamic regimes because the set of prices which firms choose will be discrete a formal equivalence is established between the model s dynamics and the theory of cellular automata

staggered vs synchronised wage setting in oligopoly abstract this paper analyses the dynamic equilibrium which emerges when wages are bargained upon at different times in the various firms operating in an oligopolistic industry unions set wages the management of the firms the output level and the outcome of this interaction is captured by the game theoretic concept of markov perfect equilibrium the steady state equilibrium is compared with that which would emerge if all wage negotiations occurred simultaneously it is shown that staggered wage setting leads to higher steady state levels of wage and unemployment than synchronised wage setting it is also shown that a longer duration for wage contracts leads other things equal to lower wages and higher employment the final part of the paper shows that allowing for nash bargaining between union and management and for risk averse unions does not alter the conclusions of the paper

mixed strategy in oligopoly pricing evidence from gasoline price cycles before and under a timing regulation this paper studies oligopoly firms dynamic pricing strategies in a gasoline market before and after the introduction of a unique law that constrains firms to set price simultaneously and only once per day the observed gasoline pricing behavior both before and under the law is well captured by the edgeworth price cycle equilibrium in the maskin and tirole dynamic oligopoly model my results highlight the importance of price commitment in tacit collusion i also find evidence that the price leadership outcome under the law is better predicted by mixed strategies play than by alternative hypotheses

time to build and fluctuations in bulk shipping abstract this paper explores the nature of fluctuations in world bulk shipping by quantifying the impact of time to build and demand uncertainty on investment and prices we examine the impact of both construction lags and their lengthening in periods of high investment activity by constructing a dynamic model of ship entry and exit a rich dataset of secondhand ship sales allows for a new estimation strategy resale prices provide direct information on value functions and allow their nonparametric estimation we find that moving from time varying to constant to no time to build reduces prices while significantly increasing both the level and volatility of investment jel g31 l11 l62 l92

asynchronized multiperiod commitments and cycles abstract we consider a game where agents can synchronize or stagger their decisions we compare the outcomes of both timing patterns and show that spillovers and strategic interactions are crucial for such a comparison a typology used in industrial organization distinguishing four cases fat cat top dog lean and hungry puppy dog allows us to compare the actions taken in the staggered variant and in the synchronized one the staggered variant exhibits cycles and players are both better off when there are strategic complementarities between them a timing game is then set up so as to endogenize the choice between the two variants we study two examples are developed i bertrand competition and ii a wage setting game when there are two monopoly unions in two interrelated firms we show that the staggering of price decisions generates counter cyclical mark ups in the first example and the staggering of wage decisions generates cycling output in the industry in the second example

r d outsourcing and contractual governance an empirical study of commercial r d projects abstract three complementary models derived from transaction cost economics and property rights theory are constructed to explore the boundary between internal and external r d projects and the governance mechanisms of external r d projects contracted out by private business firms whereas the boundary between external and internal projects is explained with sunk cost potentials the uses of governance mechanisms for external projects in terms of control and property rights are explained with reference to both potential sunk costs technical novelty in the r d work and expected resale value of the final r d outputs the models are empirically tested on 80 projects from the norwegian information technology industry half of which are contracted out to non profit research institutes and half of which are made in house by private manufacturing firms the results support both the boundary hypotheses and three of four control incentive hypotheses the theoretical implications involved in choosing between internal and external r d projects and in designing control and property rights for external projects are discussed

convergence to symmetry in dynamic strategic models of r d the undiscounted case abstract will r d increase or decrease the asymmetry between firms over time we examine this issue in the context of a dynamic alternate move duopoly model of non cooperative r d the asymmetry we consider is with respect to the initial stocks of technological knowledge which provides one firm a greater potential for current and future profits in the product market utilizing a value loss process constructed from the optimality equation of dynamic programming we show that for the undiscounted case the asymmetry between the firms disappears over time we obtain this convergence to symmetry result by imparting a temporal character to r d through the notion that r d investment cannot be changed instantaneously by allowing research externalities complementarity or substitutability between own and appropriated r d and either increasing decreasing or constant returns to scale in the production of technical knowledge from own and rival r d

an empirical analysis of dynamic nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry this article develops a dynamic model of nonprice competition in an oligopolistic industry and uses it to analyze advertising competition in the u s cigarette industry the model generalizes existing studies by allowing advertising to affect both firm market shares and the total size of the market the model also allows dynamic conjectural variations to arise from the intertemporal links created by the durability of advertising we use these dynamic conjectural variations to distinguish alternative models of competitive interaction we estimate the complete model of firm production demand and advertising choice by using data for u s cigarette producers the results indicate that firm advertising primarily affects the level of market demand with a firm s effect on rival firms market shares arising through variations in the number of brands sold empirical results on firm behavior suggest that firms act as if their advertising choices will alter the future advertising choices of rival firms in both the high tar and low tar cigarette markets

the evolution of consistent conjectures in this paper we model the evolution of conjectures in an economy consisting of a large number of firms which meet in duopolies the duopoly game is modelled by the conjectural variation cv model an evolutionary process leads to more profitable conjectures becoming more common payoff monotonic dynamics under this class of selection dynamics convergence occurs to a small set of serially undominated strategies containing the consistent conjecture this set can be made arbitrarily small by appropriate choice of the strategy set if the game is dominance solvable then the dynamics converge globally to the unique attractor

adapting behaviors through a learning process this paper concerns the concepts of conjectures and reactions of agents in a dynamic context a framework where agents form conjectures on how the other agents would react to their actions and update this belief according to observations they decide based on this conjecture without knowing profit functions of other agents agents somehow learn about the behavior including the conjectures of the other agents we show that some type of consistency of these conjectures spontaneously appears we discuss the pareto optimality and the local stability of the strategies obtained in the long run and analyze the example of cournot s oligopoly

uk bank services for small business how competitive is the market abstract this study is the first to employ an econometric model to examine the pricing behaviour of british financial institutions with respect to key bank products services offered to small and medium sized enterprises smes including current accounts investment accounts business loans and mortgages a mean group approach is used on a panel of monthly data to gauge individual banks reactions to identify factors influencing the setting of deposit and loan rates and to assess the competitive structure that best describes the uks sme banking market though the results should be interpreted with caution the empirical evidence is suggestive of a complex oligopoly policies directed at improving information and making it easier for small businesses to change banks accounts would reduce inertia and improve competition among financial institutions

an examination of opportunistic action within research alliances evidence from the biotechnology industry abstract like a photographer trying to take a perfect picture an entrepreneur trying to increase the odds of survival must learn very quickly that focus is everything and what demands an entrepreneur s immediate focus is the development of new products entrepreneurial ventures depend on the rapid creation of new products to gain access to early cash flows create legitimacy grab early market share and increase their odds of survival schoonhoven eisenhardt and lymman 1990 however the increasing costs and complexity of new product development are making it difficult for entrepreneurial ventures to contain the assets needed for successful r d within their boundaries forcing them to reach beyond their borders to access resources barley et al 1992 document the use of more than 900 contractual research agreements within the biotechnology industry alone recent research has also found a positive relationship between the use of alliances in the r d process and the rate of new product development deeds and hill 1996 shan walker and kogut 1994 this particular study focuses on the use of relational contracts in the r d process and extends the prior work on relational contracts to create an explanatory model of the deterrents to opportunism within a relational contract the article begins with a discussion of the traditional modes of deterring opportunism and of modes of deterring opportunism based on the development of a strong cross boundary relationship from this discussion hypotheses are derived that relate certain characteristics of the alliance frequency of communication strength of contractual deterrents hostage investments age of the relationship etc to the level of opportunism within the relationship these hypotheses are then tested on a sample of 109 research alliances in the biotechnology industry we found significant evidence that a strong relationship between the partners serves as a much more effective deterrent to opportunistic action than the creation of hostage investments or contingent claims contracts in particular the results for frequency of communication and the background of the firm highlight the importance of the top management team s understanding and involvement in the management of research alliances the strong results for background congruence indicates the importance of shared expectations and understandings between the partners the strong empirical results for the hypothesized u shaped relationship between age and opportunism provide support for the existence of both a honeymoon period in the relationship and a liability of adolescence among research alliances the data also suggest that the honeymoon period for an alliance will last about 4 6 years we also find that the honeymoon period for alliances that are of little importance to the future of the firm is only 4 1 years and in our sample of alliances that were important to the future of the firm the honeymoon period extended from 4 6 years to 6 1 years

the secrets of industry are in the air industrial cooperation and the organizational dynamics of the innovative firm abstract the purpose of this exploratory work is to contribute to the elaboration of an analytical framework appropriate to the study of the organizational forms involved in technological cooperation the approach used herein is one of formulating those properties of the process of integration and association of resources that are not based on the economics of transaction costs these properties suggest that the integration and the association of resources are necessary for the creation of technology but are also a source of irreversibility after having defined the concept of organizational balance of innovative firms which corresponds to the possibility of reconciling specific resources with the reversibility of technological capacity i will attempt to show that the forms of cooperation as much intra as inter firm constitute the basic principle of organization and functioning of innovative firms i shall be able thus to give a positive reading of technological cooperation on the basis of an economic analysis of organization

capacity investment preemption and commitment in an infinite horizon model the commitment value of capacity is analyzed in an infinite horizon duopoly model the paper focuses on the role of alternative behavioral assumptions about the ability of firms to commit to investment paths each firm s investment strategy in a feedback nash equilibrium is shown to be a decreasing function of its rival s current capacity this creates an incentive for a firm to expand its capacity to preempt subsequent rival investment in a precommitment equilibrium there are no incentives to invest preemptively as a consequence steady state capacity levels are greater in a feedback nash equilibrium than in a precommitment equilibrium copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

the dynamics of price dispersion or edgeworth variations abstract hypotheses on the dynamics of dispersed prices are extracted from computer simulations and theory and are tested using laboratory data as predicted in some variations of the edgeworth hypothesis the data exhibit a significant cycle relative to the unique stationary distribution the empirical distribution of posted prices has excess mass in an interval that declines until it approaches the lower boundary of the stationary distribution then jumps upward and the downward cycle resumes the amplitude of the cycle seems fairly constant over the longer experimental sessions a hybrid of gradient dynamics and logit dynamics seems to best reproduce the observed dynamics

alternative time patterns of decisions and dynamic strategic interactions this paper offers a simple approach to study steady state markov perfect equilibria arising in dynamic games when players are obliged to commit their actions for several periods it highlights the importance of spillovers and dynamic strategic interactions when assessing the various time patterns conceivable in such games the obtained results are then applied to various either micro or macroeconomic issues where time patterns of decisions matter

market structure and endogenous productivity growth how do r d subsidies affect market structure abstract conclusions about optimal rd 2 distribution of firm sizes and 3 more complex market structures that vary across industries and over time this paper presents the partial equilibrium for a single industry demonstrating how growth promoting r d subsidies alter the endogenously determined market structure subsidies to r d stretch the distribution of market shares with an increased number of firms in the market but a higher variance in the market shares across firms

dynamic oligopoly with capacity adjustment costs abstract the literature on strategic investment emphasized the case of completely irreversible investment this paper considers an oligopoly model in which investment is reversible and capacity is subject to adjustment costs an n player linear quadratic differential game is analyzed existence and characterization results for perfect equilibrium feedback strategies are provided feedback strategies provide incentives for each player to invest strategically so as to preempt subsequent expansion by rivals a larger set of perfect equilibria is constructed by using memory dependent trigger strategies equilibria of this type are shown to support joint value maximization for some initial states and asymmetric steady states

measuring the impacts of teachers comment chetty friedman and rockoff 2014a b study value added va measures of teacher effectiveness cfr 2014a exploits teacher switching as a quasi experiment concluding that student sorting creates negligible bias in va scores cfr 2014b finds va scores are useful proxies for teachers effects on students long run outcomes i successfully reproduce each in north carolina data but i find that the quasi experiment is invalid as teacher switching is correlated with changes in student preparedness adjusting for this i find moderate bias in va scores perhaps 10 35 percent as large in variance terms as teachers causal effects long run results are sensitive to controls and cannot support strong conclusions

export subsidies under dynamic duopoly abstract in this paper i analyze an export subsidy game under a dynamic cournot duopoly using a discrete time markov equilibrium model of dynamic cournot duoply according to maskin and tirole 1987 assuming a linear demand function i will show that under a dynamic duopoly 1 firms are more sensitive to changes in export subsidies 2 the equilibrium export subsidy in an export subsidy game is smaller 3 the output at the subsidy equilibrium is larger than a static duopoly with lower subsidy and higher output the welfare in countries under a dynamic duopoly is higher than a static duopoly

markov perfect equilibrium in multi period games between sponsor and bureau we formulate a simple model of the interaction between a sponsor and a bureau the sponsor sets the bureau s budget while the bureau decides on how much to spend on slack we compute numerically markov perfect equilibria of multi period games where the agents move alternately and apply markov strategies both agents are worse off compared to the one period game with simultaneous moves as the discount factors increase the equilibrium outcome becomes less cooperative in nature

competition in the interexchange telecommunication market abstract using an econometric model that allows the nature of the oligopoly interaction to be determined by the data we estimate residual demand elasticities for the switched inter lata local access and transport area services of at t mci and sprint for the 9 year period from the third quarter of 1989 to the first quarter of 1998 these estimates fall in the relatively inelastic 1 5 to 1 9 range statistical tests of the several elasticity relationships decisively reject hypotheses of perfect competition and a cournot interaction but do not reject the hypothesis that the market functioned as a coordinated oligopoly

negotiations in multi issue committees abstract we propose a non cooperative bargaining approach to the problem of collective decision making in committees by modelling this process as a sequential bargaining game the main objective of the paper is to discuss the formation of the agenda in multi issue committees and its relation to the importance of the issues we start by asserting that in the case of a single issue the set of all equilibrium outcomes of our game coincides with the set of coalitional stable outcomes we then consider multi issue committees to discuss the problem of forming agendas we argue that from the point of view of efficiency and stability the most important issues should be put first on the agenda we conclude with a sufficient condition on players preferences which guarantees the efficiency and stability of the bargaining outcomes for every possible agenda

a dynamic model of entry and exit in a growing industry the potential demand in a new industry evolves over time demand is initially low but advertising by the industry s early entrants can speed up demand growth however there is intrinsic uncertainty of the demand level in each period and uncertainty of the demand evolution path which can be affected by the underlying economic environment we construct a dynamic model that features the stochastically and endogenously expanding demand of a new industry and we investigate the optimal entry and exit behavior of firms as the industry evolves we find that firms incentive to enter early depends critically on the cost that early entrants have to pay in developing the market when the cost is high and the benefit spills over to potential entrants firms have an incentive to wait and the probability of entry can increase with the number of incumbents under certain circumstances firms entry strategy is also influenced by the transition of economic states firms are more likely to enter under a state that shows the prospect of demand taking off soon we also find that in the early stage of an industry higher demand uncertainty can induce faster entry

sequential moves and tacit collusion reaction function cycles in a finite pricing duopoly abstract this paper analyzes a finite horizon sequential move pricing duopoly restricting attention to markov strategies the solution yields stationary patterns independent of initial conditions where the reaction functions follow cycles of three periods the market price never settles down and is at all times strictly above marginal cost long run average industry profits are approximately 5 6 of the monopoly level these results demonstrate that neither a long horizon nor non markovian strategies are required for persistent profits in dynamic price competition games journal of economic literature classification numbers c73 d43 l13

empirical analysis of closed loop duopoly advertising strategies closed loop perfect equilibria in a lanchester duopoly differential game of advertising competition are used as the basis for empirical investigation two systems of simultaneous nonlinear equations are formed one from a general lanchester model and one from a constrained model two empirical applications are conducted in one involving coca cola and pepsi cola a formal statistical testing procedure is used to detect whether closed loop equilibrium advertising strategies are used by the competitors rather than open loop strategies in the second application involving anheuser busch and miller the general model is estimated results indicate that closed loop equilibria better explain dynamic advertising competition than do open loop equilibria also closed loop equilibrium advertising strategies implied by model estimates show that competitive advertising levels may or may not be monotonic in market share

oligopoly exploitation of a private property productive asset abstract in this paper we build a closed loop nash equilibrium of a private property productive asset oligopoly we compare and contrast private with common property in terms of exploitation rates and social welfare and provide a comparative dynamic analysis with respect to the number of firms in the industry contrary to previous studies on oligopolistic exploitation of productive assets before exploitation begins the resource is parcelled out each firm privately owns and manages the assigned parcel over the entire planning horizon compared with the common property regime we find a new set of results both in the short and in the long run as for social welfare we provide conditions on the implicit growth rate and the initial asset stock under which the socially optimal allocation of the resource implies a natural monopoly

on endogenously staggered prices taylor s model of staggered contracts is an influential explanation for nominal inertia and the persistent real effects of nominal shocks however in standard imperfect competition models if agents are allowed to choose the timing of pricing decisions they will typically choose to synchronize this paper provides a simple model of imperfect competition which produces stable staggering our argument relies on strategic interaction at two levels between firms within an industries and across industries and produces a continuum of staggered price equilibria these equilibria are strict and hence stable under a simple adaptive learning process an enduring problem for business cycle theory is an explanation for the persistent effects of nominal shocks explaining persistence is particularly problematic for theories based on nominal shocks as opposed to real shocks this is because rational expectations implies that nominal shocks themselves cannot be serially correlated since nominal shocks are the deviation of realized nominal magnitudes from expected values in two important papers taylor 1979 1980 provided an argument as to why a nominal shock can have persistent effects taylor s argument required two important assumptions first he assumed that firms could adjust prices only in alternate periods an assumption which may be justified by menu or information costs taylor s second assumption was that price setting was staggered half the firms were constrained to adjust prices in odd periods while the other half were allowed to adjust prices in even periods these two assumptions combined to provide dramatic results on nominal inertia the adjustment of prices to a nominal shock is slow and hence output effects are long lasting taylor s results on persistence arise due to strategic complementarity between price setting decisions this implies that each firm s optimal price is an increasing function of the aggregate price level if a shock arrives in an even period firms in the even cohort will not adjust fully to the nominal shock since firms in the odd cohort have fixed prices in the current period furthermore with rational expectations the even cohort also takes into account the fact that its own failure to adjust fully will also make for partial adjustment in future periods this elegant story has made taylor s model possibly the most influential of new keynesian models by providing a dynamic setting within which small nominal rigidities may result in persistent nominal inertia