durable goods and product obsolescence the issue of product obsolescence is addressed by examining the optimal sales strategy of a monopolist firm that may introduce an improved version of its current product consumers expectations of a forthcoming product lowers the price that they are willing to pay for the current product because of its loss in value due to obsolescence the new product is characterized by consumers increased willingness to pay and by its competitive interaction with the old product these characteristics affect the tradeoff that the firm makes between the cost of waiting for new product sales versus the cost of cannibalizing these sales we analyze the effect of these characteristics of the new product on the firm s optimal sales strategy we consider the various policy measures available to the firm including limiting initial sales in order to lower cannibalization of the new product buying back the earlier version of the product in order to generate greater demand for the new product and announcements of future product introductions we find that for modest levels of product improvement the firm s optimal policy is to phase out sales of the old product while for large improvements a buy back policy is more profitable lastly we find that the firm is better off if it informs consumers whether a new product is forthcoming

inflation and reputation in many macroeconomic models with rational expectations optimal policy is time inconsistent and therefore announced policy may not be credible this paper models the government s credibility explicitly using kreps and wilson s analysis time consistent optimal government policy emerges as a sequential equilibrium in a repeated game this policy is at least as good as the inconsistent optimal policy and dominates the consistent policy when reputational effects are ignored thus the analysis resolves the problem of specifying a credible optimal policy in such models the results show why attempts to disinflate may lead to recession even with perfectly flexible prices this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

why democracies produce efficient results by applying the standard tools of microeconomic analysis i argue that democratic markets work as well as economic markets in particular i show that previous work has greatly exaggerated the existence of principal agent and informational problems in electoral markets and has drawn incorrect conclusions

the constitution of economic policy one of the most exciting intellectual moments of my career was my 1984 discovery of knut wicksell s unknown and untranslated dissertation finanztheoretische untersuchungen buried in the dusty stacks of chicago s old harper library only the immediate post dissertation leisure of an academic novice allowed for the browsing that produced my own dramatic example of learning by serendipity wicksell s new principle of justice in taxation gave me a tremendous surge of self confidence wicksell who was an established figure in the history of economic ideas challenged the orthodoxy of public finance theory along lines that were congenial with my own developing stream of critical consciousness from that moment in chicago i took on the determination to make wicksell s contribution known to a wider audience and i commenced immediately a translation effort that took some time and considerable help from elizabeth henderson before final publication this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

trade ins and introductory offers in a monopoly we model the commonly used marketing practices of offering discounts to either repeat buyers trade ins or new buyers introductory offers of a quasi durable good we analyze these practices in terms of their potential for intertemporal and third degree price discrimination in our two period model the monopolist sets a first period price that segments the second period market optimally into holders and nonholders of the good in the second period different prices are quoted to the two market segments we present three versions of the model with varying assumptions on consumers rationality

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

commitment and monopoly pricing in durable goods models this article investigates the issue of commitment by a durable goods monopolist two models of the interaction between durability recycling and market power are compared the two differ according to the ability f the seller to credibly commit to a given salec qtrn egy this article takes the standard durable goods monopoly model extends it to allow for depreciation and compares the monopoly markup with swan s predicted markup for a recycled good the difference between the two models is shown to reduce to a single parameter in the markup equation

why would a durable good monopolist also produce a cost inefficient nondurable good abstract we develop both commitment and time consistent stationary policies for a monopolist who produces a mixture of goods distinguished by production costs and degree of durability under commitment only the cost efficient durable good is produced and the monopoly output is realized each period for the time consistent stationary case there is an interval for the degree of durability where only the durable good is produced and a higher non overlapping interval where both the cost efficient durable and the cost inefficient nondurable good are produced for any period length when the degree of durability is such that both durable and nondurable goods are provided combined output is less than the competitive output and decreases in the degree of durability approaching the single period monopoly output when both goods are produced the coase conjecture does not hold

foundations of dynamic monopoly and the coase conjecture subgame perfect equilibria are characterized for a market in which the seller quotes a price each period assume zero costs positive interest rate continuum of buyers and some technical conditions if buyers valuations are positive then equilibrium is unique buyers strategies are stationary and the price sequence is determinant along the equilibrium path but possibly randomized elsewhere otherwise a continuum of stationary equilibria can exist but at most one with analytic strategies coase s conjecture is verified for stationary strategies reducing the period length drives all prices to zero or the least valuation connections to bargaining models are described journal qf economic literature classification

do price ceilings abroad increase u s drug prices abstract for a monopolist who price discriminates between two markets how does the imposition or lowering of a binding price ceiling in one market affect the price in the other unregulated market our analysis reveals that the imposition or lowering of the price ceiling may actually lower the price in the unregulated market

revenue management for durable goods using trade ins with certified pre owned options abstract the economics research suggests that firms can use trade ins as a revenue management device for price discrimination between new and replacement buyers of durabprle goods offering different prices to different groups of customers creates a market segmentation effect this study examines such an effect by considering trade ins and certified pre owned options for a durable goods firm where certified pre owned cpo represents the used goods market generated from the return flow of trade in transactions the optimal pricing and or trade in rebate is determined and the strategic choice between the two options is examined an analytical model is developed that incorporates the key durable goods features into model formulation specifically the deterioration rate or durability in a reverse measure and the variation in quality of the used goods our research findings indicate that i the magnitude of trade in rebates increases with the deterioration rate and quality variation ii the segmentation effect outweighs the cannibalization effect when the deterioration rate is moderately high iii the strategic choice of trade ins and cpo options is critically dependent on these two features and iv the majority of profit improvement is generated from trade in provisions although the cpo option can serve as a second profit boosting device

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

bundling of substitutes or complements abstract the adams yellen two good bundling framework is generalized to allow the goods to be substitutes or complements general theorems on price change effects are given a monopolist may find it most profitable to offer the goods only as a bundle even if they are imperfect substitutes or to not bundle the goods even if they are complements if one good is competitively sold a monopoly producer of the other good can never increase profits by offering his good only as part of a bundle however such a monopolist might profitably offer his good in both bundled and unbundled form to price discriminate even if the two goods are substitutes

cyclic pricing by a durable goods monopolist in the model of this paper a monopoly seller of a durable good holds periodic sales as a means of price discrimination a new cohort of consumers enters the market in each period interested in purchasing the good either immediately or after a delay within each cohort consumers vary in their tastes for the good under broad conditions the seller will vary the price over time in most periods he will charge a price just low enough to sell immediately to consumers with a high willingness to pay periodically however he will drop the price far enough to sell to an accumulated group of consumers with a low willingness to pay

third down with a yard to go recursive expected utility and the dixit skeath conundrum abstract in two outcome strictly competitive games equilibrium mixed strategies do not depend on ultimate prizes dixit and skeath games of strategy 1999 norton new york find this counter intuitive we show this invariance comes from reduction not independence and provide conditions for intuitive comparative statics under recursive expected utility

politics and economics in weak and strong states abstract while much research in political economy points out the benefits of limited government political scientists have long emphasized the problems created in many less developed nations by weak states which lack the power to tax and regulate the economy and to withstand the political and social challenges from non state actors i construct a model in which the state apparatus is controlled by a self interested ruler who tries to divert resources for his own consumption but who can also invest in socially productive public goods both weak and strong states create distortions when the state is excessively strong the ruler imposes such high taxes that economic activity is stifled when the state is excessively weak the ruler anticipates that he will not be able to extract rents in the future and underinvests in public goods i show that the same conclusion applies in the analysis of both the economic power of the state i e its ability to raise taxes and its political power i e its ability to remain entrenched from the citizens i also discuss how under certain circumstances a different type of equilibrium which i refer to as consensually strong state equilibrium can emerge whereby the state is politically weak but is allowed to impose high taxes as long as a sufficient fraction of the proceeds are invested in public goods the consensually strong state might best correspond to the state in oecd countries where taxes are high despite significant control by the society over the government

the origins of state capacity property rights taxation and politics economists generally assume that the state has sufficient institutional capacity to support markets and levy taxes this paper develops a framework where policy choices in market regulation and taxation are constrained by past investments in legal and fiscal capacity it studies the economic and political determinants of such investments demonstrating that legal and fiscal capacity are typically complements the results show that among other things common interest public goods such as fighting external wars as well as political stability and inclusive political institutions are conducive to building state capacity some correlations in cross country data are consistent with the theory

sales and consumer lock in this paper examines the dynamically consistent price path for a new product monopolist unable to commit to future prices when consumers must incur setup costs of adopting the product the authors find that setup costs give rise to a price path with introductory sales along the path periods of high prices during which only locked in or captive customers buy the product alternate with sales low price periods during which new customers adopt the product as the stock of captive customers increases over time sales become less frequent after the customer base reaches some critical level no further sales take place they show that the monopolist may hold a sleeping patient in which initial sales of the product are postponed to avoid locking into a high pricing strategy that ignores new customers copyright 1989 by the london school of economics and political science

a note on expanding networks and monopoly pricing we obtain explicitly the optimal path of prices for a monopolist operating in a network industry during a finite number of periods we describe this optimal path as a function of network intensity and horizon length and show that the prices are increasing in time and that for very low network intensity or very high horizon length the monopolist will offer the good at zero price in the initial period

understanding the role of trade ins in durable goods markets theory and evidence the act of trading in a used car as partial payment for a new car resonates with practically all consumers such transactions are prevalent in many other durable goods markets ranging from golf clubs to ct scanners what roles do trade ins play in these markets what motivates the seller to set up a channel to facilitate trade ins intuitively accepting a trade in would appear to stimulate demand for the producer s product but facilitating the resale of these used goods that substitute for new goods might also increase cannibalization although such transactions involve billions of dollars we know relatively little about this practice from the extant research literature this paper develops an analytical model that incorporates key features of real world durable goods markets i coexistence of new and used goods markets ii consumer heterogeneity with respect to quality sensitivity iii firms that anticipate the cannibalization problem arising from the coexistence of new and used goods and iv lemon problems in resale markets whereby sellers of used goods are better informed than buyers about the quality of their particular item in our analysis a trade in policy amounts to an intervention by the firm in the used goods market which reduces inefficiencies arising from the lemon problem it motivates owners to purchase new goods and reduces their proclivity to hold on to purchased goods because of the low price the latter would fetch in a lemon market we also show that trade in programs are more valuable for less reliable products as well as for products that deteriorate more slowly our analysis shows that producers in durable goods markets should consider trade in programs as a matter of routine despite cannibalization concerns arising from a more active resale market a producer s profits will inevitably rise from introducing trade ins given pervasive lemon problems we test the key predictions of the model about price and volume of trade by assembling a data set of transactions of u s automobile consumers and find broad support for our model

inefficiency in legislative policymaking a dynamic analysis this paper develops an infinite horizon model of public spending and taxation in which policy decisions are determined by legislative bargaining the policy space incorporates both productive and distributive public spending and distortionary taxation the productive spending is investing in a public good that benefits all citizens e g national defense and the distributive spending is district specific transfers e g pork barrel spending investment in the public good creates a dynamic linkage across policymaking periods the analysis explores the dynamics of legislative policy choices focusing on the efficiency of the steady state level of

fragile states and development policy it is widely recognized that fragile states are key symptoms of under development in many parts of the world such states are incapable of delivering basic services to their citizens and political violence is commonplace as of yet mainstream development economics has not dealt in any systematic way with such concerns and the implications for development assistance this paper puts forward a framework for analyzing fragile states and applies it to a variety development policies in different types of states

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

imperfect monitoring and impermanent reputations we study the long run sustainability of reputations in games with imperfect public monitoring it is impossible to maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that does not play an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty about types thus a player cannot indefinitely sustain a reputation for noncredible behavior in the presence of imperfect monitoring

urban congestion and developer precommitments unilateral solutions to dynamic inconsistency the sale of housing creates a dynamic inconsistency problem for residential developers who find it profit maximising to overdevelop an area once ownership of the existing housing stock has been transferred to local residents rational buyers lower the prices they are willing to pay in expectation of this future congestion it is therefore in the developers interest to attract higher prices by credibly precommitting themselves unilaterally to construction plans that are optimal for each housing tract if the externalities associated with congestion affect quality of life in neighbouring tracts however development will still exceed the efficient level the introduction of master planned communities where a single development company commits future developer builders to a plan for the construction of multiple contiguous housing tracts can create the expectation of future population densities that will be optimal on a city wide level

limited records and reputation bubbles abstract this paper offers a tractable and fully rational model to study the economics of reputation in a dynamic market with limited record keeping i e a market in which new entrants observe only the last few periods of play of the long run player instead of the full history of the market we show that trust is gradually granted to the opportunistic long run player despite the fact that his type is perfectly observed by the short run opponents and the perfectly informed short run players ride and drive up reputation bubbles at the expense of their uninformed successors we characterize equilibrium payoffs uniformly over time which is useful for analyzing ongoing repeated relationships where the starting moments have passed

the strategic role of exchange promotions an exchange promotion allows consumers to turn in an old good and receive a discount toward the purchase of a new product the old good that is turned in can either be within the same category as the new good or it may be in a different category for example one can turn in an old cd player to count toward a new cd player a within category exchange or traditional trade in or toward a new television a cross category exchange this paper studies both within category and multicategory exchange promotions and analyzes their similarities and differences in a competitive setting with two firms we model exchange promotions and establish the equilibrium outcomes we find that categories in which consumers have a high level of waste aversion are more likely to have multicategory exchange promotions rather than within category or no promotions multicategory exchange promotions can increase both consumers replacement purchases and their new purchases interestingly we also find that strategic considerations can lead to a prisoner s dilemma outcome in which neither firm offers any kind of exchange promotion however waste aversion and multicategory exchange promotions can give firms stronger incentives to get out of the prisoner s dilemma outcome

monopoly extraction of a durable non renewable resource failure of the coase conjecture the author studies a perfect information rational expectations markov equilibrium for the situation where a monopolist extracts a nonrenewable resource that is converted to a durable good even if short run extraction costs are constant the coase conjectur e fails provided that the depreciation rate of the durable good is positive copyright 1993 by the london school of economics and political science

the power to tax analytical foundations of a fiscal constitution preface 1 taxation in constitutional perspective 2 natural government a model of leviathan 3 constraints on base and rate structure 4 the taxation of commodities 5 taxation through time income taxes capital taxes and public debt 6 money creation and taxation 7 the disposition of public revenues 8 the domain of politics 9 open economy federalism and taxing authority 10 toward authentic tax reform prospects and prescriptions epilogue notes selected bibliography index

the political economy of benefits and costs a neoclassical approach to distributive politics this essay offers a rational political explanation for the notorious inefficiency of pork barrel projects with an optimization model of legislative behavior and legislative institutions the model emphasizes the economically arbitrary from a welfare point of view importance of the geographic incidence of benefits and costs owing to the geographic basis for political representation we explore the implications of a legislator s objective function and derive conditions under which a representative legislature will select an omnibus of projects each of which exceeds the efficient scale

predation reputation and entry deterrence abstract economists often argue that predatory practices are irrational since there exist cheaper or more certain means to gain or maintain a monopoly our gametheoretic equilibrium analysis suggests that if a firm is threatened by several potential entrants then predation may be rational against early entrants even if it is costly when viewed in isolation because it yields a reputation which deters other entrants asymmetric information plays a crucial role in our analysis since it provides the rationale for entrants to base their expectations of the firm s future behavior on its past actions the analysis also suggests methods to treat general reputational phenomena

optimal strategies for trade old for remanufactured programs receptivity durability and subsidy due to its environmental financial and marketing benefits businesses and governments have increasingly embraced remanufacturing however the weak demand for remanufactured reman product severely hinders the implementation of remanufacturing lately trade old for remanufactured tor programs are growing in popularity as they can boost reman product demand in this paper we investigate the conditions when a firm should offer a tor program and how to best implement it our main findings are 1 firms should offer tor programs only when reman product receptivity and new product durability satisfy a certain condition 2 in addition to the reman product receptivity the new product durability also plays a significant role in motivating consumers to participate in tor programs and finally 3 high product remanufacturability and government subsidies are strong incentives for firms to offer their tor programs our analysis provides insights for firms and governments on how to use tor programs to benefit businesses consumers and the environment

a theory of economic obsolescence a new generation of durable goods makes an old generation economically even if not physically obsolete economic obsolescence due to technological innovation requires the durable goods monopolist to implement price discrimination in two dimensions both between consumers with different valuations and between consumers with different purchase histories equilibrium in the game between the durable goods monopolist and consumers depends on the extent of economic obsolescence and the relative sizes of the consumer groups underinvestment in innovation may take place this contrasts with the standard literature on planned obsolescence where the durable goods monopolist overinvests in durability reducing technology

welfare effects of entry into markets with switching costs in many markets consumers have costs of switching between products that are functionally identical this note shows that entry of efficient low cost competitors into these markets may be socially detrimental in a linear model entry reduces social welfare as conventionally defined in more than half of the relevant parameter space in a more general model there is always a range of values of switching costs for which entry reduces welfare even if the entrant s production costs are lower than the incumbent s copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

quality upgrades and equilibrium in a dynamic monopoly market abstract we examine an infinite horizon model of quality growth for a durable goods monopoly the seller may offer any bundle s of current and previous quality improvements upgrades subgame perfect equilibrium seller payoffs range from capturing the full social surplus down to only the initial flow value of each good as long as the value of all future quality growth exceeds the value of a single unit each of these payoffs is realized in a markov perfect equilibrium that follows the socially efficient path however inefficient delay equilibria with bundling exist for innovation rates above a threshold

sources of inefficiency in a representative democracy a dynamic analysis this paper studies the efficiency of policy choice in representative democracies it extends the citizen candidate model of democratic policy making to a dynamic environment equilibrium policy choices are shown to be efficient in the sense that in each period conditional on future policies being selected through the democratic process there exists no alternative current policy choices which can raise the expected utilities of all citizens however policies that would be declared efficient by standard economic criteria are not necessarily adopted in political equilibrium the paper argues that these divergencies are legitimately viewed as politicalfailures

the timing of sales this paper presents a model of intertemporal price discrimination a fixed number of sellers produce a homogeneous good consumers with different preferences enter the market in each period and leave when they make a purchase the sellers typically vary their prices over time charging a high price in most periods but occasionally cutting the price to sell to a large group of customers with a low reservation price in some equilibria all stores lower their price at the same time and to the same level

the informational role of product trade ins for pricing durable goods this research theorizes that sellers of durable goods can utilize inferences about the buyer s willingness to pay based not only on her decision to trade in the old good but also on its characteristics we find empirical support for this theory using transaction data for new car purchases the results support the notion that dealers infer a higher willingness to pay and charge higher prices to consumers who trade in a used vehicle than to those who do not we also find that dealers charge even higher prices to those consumers who trade in used cars that are similar to the new one

who wants a good reputation we examine a market in which long lived firms face a short term incentive to exert low effort but could earn higher profits if it were possible to commit to high effort there are two types of firms inept firms who can only exert low effort and competent firms who have a choice between high and low effort there is occasional exit and competent and inept potential entrants compete for the right to inherit the departing firm s reputation consumers receive noisy signals of effort choice and so competent firms choose high effort in an attempt to distinguish themselves from inept firms a competent firm is most likely to enter the market by purchasing an average reputation in the hopes of building it into a good reputation than either a very low reputation or a very high reputation inept firms in contrast find it more profitable to either buy high reputations and deplete them or buy low reputations

a reputation refinement without equilibrium the economic literature concerning agents reputations has grown steadily since the seminal work of kreps milgrom roberts and wilson 2 early work focused on how incomplete information leads to equilibria that are vastly different but more intuitive than those possible in the complete information game recently however game theorists have been studying how incomplete information might refine the set of equilibria 3 one important class of games is that in which a single long run agent plays a simultaneous move stage game with a sequence of opponents each of whom plays only once yet observes all previous play fudenberg and levine 1989 study the reputation of the long run player in this type of game they argue that the most reasonable equilibrium is the one which the long run player most prefers their intuition is sustained when one perturbs the game with the stackelberg strategy fudenberg and levine show that in the perturbed game the equilibrium payoffs of the long run player are bounded below by a number that converges to the stackelberg payoff

reputation with analogical reasoning we consider a repeated interaction between a long run player and a sequence of short run players in which the long run player may either be rational or may be a mechanical type who plays the same possibly mixed action in every stage game we depart from the classical model in assuming that the short run players make inferences by analogical reasoning meaning that they correctly identify the average strategy of each type of long run player but do not recognize how this play varies across histories concentrating on 2 2 games we provide a characterization of equilibrium payoffs establishing a payoff bound for the rational long run player that can be strictly larger than the familiar stackelberg bound we also provide a characterization of equilibrium behavior showing that play begins with either a reputation building or a reputation spending stage depending on parameters followed by a reputation manipulation stage

choosing the right exchange old for new programs for durable goods with a rollover abstract by offering to trade in one unit of old product at a discounted price while selling new products exchange old for new eon programs have been considered efficient ways of expanding market for durable goods starting from the choice behavior of customers this paper studies optimal pricing and remanufacturing decisions for firms that adopt the eon program specifically considering a supply chain that consists of one manufacturer and one retailer we investigate two business models i in the manufacturer initiated scenario the manufacturer launches an eon program and owns all the old items that are returned he remanufactures all or a portion of the old items and sells them to a secondary market ii in the retailer initiated scenario any old items that are returned belong to the retailer she remanufactures the old items and sells them to the secondary market an in depth comparison between the optimal decisions in the two models is conducted in this paper we show it is possible that a firm may be even more profitable from being a free rider instead of offering an eon program by himself herself based on a centralized supply chain as a benchmark an exchange discount sharing contract is proposed to coordinate the supply chain and to improve the overall welfare of customers numerical experiments are conducted to show the profit impact for the supply chain members which uncover some interesting managerial insights for the proper adoption of the most efficient eon programs

reputation and equilibrium selection in games with a patient player a single long run player plays a simultaneous move stage game against a sequence of opponents who play only once but observe all previous play let the stackelberg strategy be the pure strategy to which the long run player would most like to commit himself if there is positive prior probability that the long run player will always play the stackelberg strategy then his payoff in any nash equilibrium exceeds a bound that converges to the stackelberg payoff as his discount factor approaches one when the stage game is not simultaneous move this result must be modified to account for the possibility that distinct strategies of the long run player are observationally equivalent

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

managing new and remanufactured products we study a firm that makes new products in the first period and uses returned cores to offer remanufactured products along with new products in future periods we introduce the monopoly environment in two period and multiperiod scenarios to identify thresholds in remanufacturing operations next we focus our attention on the duopoly environment where an independent operator io may intercept cores of products made by the original equipment manufacturer oem to sell remanufactured products in future periods we characterize the production quantities associated with self selection and explore the effect of various parameters in the nash equilibrium among other results we find that if remanufacturing is very profitable the original equipment manufacturer may forgo some of the first period margin by lowering the price and selling additional units to increase the number of cores available for remanufacturing in future periods further as the threat of competition increases the oem is more likely to completely utilize all available cores offering the remanufactured products at a lower price

pathologies of the state this paper uses a simple dynamic model where a government performs three functions taxation public spending and contract enforcement to study pathologies in resource allocation by government a key feature of the approach is that states may invest in their future capacities to raise taxes and protect property rights three types of state are shown to be possible in this framework common interest states redistributive states and weak states whose emergence depends on the nature of political institutions we consider both pigouvian and wicksellian benchmarks against which to compare different outcomes that might arise in political equilibrium the paper argues for a greater focus on weak government and points out that a failure to generate wicksellian unanimity lies behind them

commodity bundling by single product monopolies consider two products that have independent demands in the sense that all individual buyers consider them neither substitutes nor complements then if the two products are priced separately the demand for either is independent of the price of the other in his classic analysis of block booking of feature films george stigler shows that it may be profitable for a monopoly seller of two such products to bundle them by requiring a buyer to take both in order to get either his work provides a rationale for tying arrangements that does not depend on technological or other dependencies among the products involved 2 adams and yellen extend the analysis of multiproduct monopoly with independent demands 3 they discuss two different bundling strategies pure bundling in which the seller only offers the products in fixed proportions and mixed bundling in which buyers may either buy the products separately or purchase a bundle with fixed proportions of each in this note i consider a single product monopoly and investigate the profit and welfare implications of bundling its product for some other

disappearing private reputations in long run relationships for games of public reputation with uncertainty over types and imperfect public monitoring cripps mailath and samuelson 2004 showed that an informed player facing short lived uninformed opponents cannot maintain a permanent reputation for playing a strategy that is not part of an equilibrium of the game without uncertainty over types this paper extends that result to games in which the uninformed player is long lived and has private beliefs so that the informed player s reputation is private journal of economic literature classi cation numbers c70 c78

maintaining a reputation when strategies are imperfectly observed this paper studies reputation effects in games with a single long run player whose choice of stage game strategy is imperfectly observed by his opponents we obtain lower and upper bounds on the long run player s payoff in any nash equilibrium of the game if the long run player s stage game strategy is statistically identified by the observed outcomes then for generic payoffs the upper and lower bounds both converge as the discount factor tends to 1 to the long run player s stackelberg payoff which is the most he could obtain by publicly committing himself to any strategy

coase and hotelling a meeting of the minds in this paper we tie together the two literatures of durable goods monopoly and exhaustible resource pricing we show that the intertemporal no arbitrage condition that arises if the durable good monopolist seller can commit to a price path mirrors the intertemporal no arbitrage condition if the monopsonist buyer of an exhaustible resource can commit to a price path the intuition is that the durable good monopolist initially announces high future prices to get high valuation buyers to buy early and subsequently lowers the price to attract additional buyers on the other hand the monopsonist buyer of the exhaustible resource initially announces low future prices to encourage sellers to supply their units early and subsequently as the stock of the resource declines raises the price to call forth additional supply as the period of commitment shrinks to zero the durable good s price drops to its marginal cost and the exhaustible resource s price jumps to its choke level all in a twinkling of the eye a