almost budget balanced vcg mechanisms to assign multiple objects subsidy free vcg mechanisms assign p identical objects to n agents the efficiency loss is the largest ratio of budget surplus to efficient surplus over all profiles of non negative valuations the smallest efficiency loss l n p satisfies l n p l n n2 43n if pn is bounded away from 12 l n p converges to zero exponentially in n participation is voluntary in the optimal mechanism achieving l n p if p 1 but not if p 2 among voluntary mechanisms the optimal efficiency loss is not significantly larger than l n p if pn 12 but it does not converge to zero in n if pn 12

bank networks contagion systemic risk and prudential policy abstract we present a network model of the interbank market in which optimizing risk averse banks lend to each other and invest in non liquid assets market clearing takes place through a t tonnement process which yields the equilibrium price while traded quantities are determined by means of an assortative matching process contagion occurs through liquidity hoarding interbank interlinkages and fire sale externalities the resulting network configuration exhibits a core periphery structure dis assortative behavior and low density within this framework we analyze the effects of a stylized set of prudential policies on the stability efficiency trade off liquidity requirements unequivocally decrease systemic risk but at the cost of lower efficiency measured by aggregate investment in non liquid assets equity requirements also tend to reduce risk hence increase stability though without reducing significantly overall investment on this basis our results provide general support for the basel iii approach based on complementary regulatory metrics

executive compensation strategic competition and relative performance evaluation theory and evidence we examine compensation contracts for managers in imperfectly competitive product markets we show that strategic interactions among firms can explain the lack of relative performance based incentives in which compensation decreases with rival firm performance the need to soften product market competition generates an optimal compensation contract that places a positive weight on both own and rival performance firms in more competitive industries place greater weight on rival firm performance relative to own firm performance we find empirical evidence of a positive sensitivity of compensation to rival firm performance that is increasing in the degree of competition in the industry

when not all conflict is bad manufacturing marketing conflict and strategic incentive design researchers and managers broadly agree that coordination and harmony between manufacturing and marketing improve firm performance by eliminating suboptimal practices within the firm in this paper we present a contrasting view of the manufacturing marketing interface we model a duopoly in which the firms compete on price and quality dimensions the manufacturing and marketing managers within each firm are presented with conflicting incentives focused on cost minimization and revenue maximization respectively these managers bargain with each other before arriving at compromise decisions regarding price and quality while frequently encountered in practice this conflicting objectives puzzle is surprising because one expects that centralized coordination by the owners of the firm towards profit maximization would lead to higher profits in this paper we resolve the conflicting objectives puzzle and demonstrate that surprisingly the firm s resulting profits in this setting of conflict can be higher than those obtained when the decisions of the managers are perfectly coordinated we also analyze the equilibrium in incentive plans when the owners can choose between compromise and perfect coordination our results offer a new interpretation of manufacturing marketing conflict as a strategic tool that can enhance firm profits

a note on endogenous firm efficiency in cournot models of incomplete information abstract martin models cournot firms with informational asymmetries on costs to investigate the relation betweenx inefficiency and the number of firms he argues that an increase in the number of competitors decreases firm efficiency we show that his results hold in a complete information model they are due to the implicit assumption of increasing returns to scale we further argue that a setting of adverse selection on cost and of ex post cost observability tends to isolate the intrafirm agency problem from what happens inside the product market leaving firm efficiency unaffected by the degree of competition journal of economic literatureclassification numbers l13 l22 d82

competing vertical structures precommitment and renegotiation we consider a model where two agents privately informed about their own characteristics play a normal form game on behalf of two uninformed principals we analyze the existence of precommitment effects through public announcements of contracts in a model where agency contracts designed ex ante can always be secretly renegotiated at the ex ante and interim stages we show that the existence of precommitment effects depends both on the strategic complementarity of the agents actions and on the direct effect of the opponents actions on each principal s welfare in our model the possibility of renegotiation is crucial for the existence of precommitment effects the results are introduced through an example of cournot and bertrand competition between firms viewed as vertical structures

on the optimality of the full cost pricing abstract this article is aimed at defining the full cost pricing as a leader follower game in two tier organizations i the upstream unit fixes the production capacity and uses it as a cost driver to compute the average cost ii the downstream unit operates on the market and chooses the output level on the basis of the average cost in the cournot oligopoly case the full cost pricing is compared with other pricing rules there exists a wide range of values of the fixed cost for which the full cost pricing dominates any other pricing rules in terms of gross profit

a model of negotiated transfer pricing abstract a large majority of firms employ negotiated transfer pricing yet this method of decentralization remains largely unexplored this study develops a model of negotiated transfer pricing incorporating private divisional information as this is the setting where decentralization is most compelling the firm designs a compensation system utilizing divisional performance evaluation and negotiated transfer pricing a dynamic bargaining model is employed to capture managerial negotiations the study demonstrates that the firm can design managerial compensation schemes and bargaining infrastructures so that the negotiated transfer pricing structure allows it to reach the upper bound on available profits

formal credit corruption and the informal credit market in agriculture a theoretical analysis the paper presents a theory of interest rate determination on informal credit in backward agriculture when there is a market for formal credit the farmer has to bribe the official of the formal credit agency in order to get formal credit the official and the moneylender play a non cooperative game in choosing the amount of formal credit and the informal interest rate respectively the informal sector interest rate and the effective formal sector interest rate incorporating the bribe are equal in equilibrium a reduction in the formal interest rate and or an increase in the price of the product may lead to an increase in the equilibrium bribing rate and the informal interest rate when the formal credit and the informal credit are complementary to each other

strategic transfer pricing most research into cost systems has focused on their motivational implications this paper takes a different approach by developing a model where two oligopolistic firms strategically select their cost based transfer prices duopoly models frequently assume that firms game on their choice of prices product prices however are ultimately based on the firms transfer prices that communicate manufacturing costs to marketing departments it is for this reason that transfer prices will have a strategic component to them we derive implications for cost system choice and transfer pricing including showing that firms may cross subsidize their products a result consistent with the empirical evidence

implementing just and efficient decision making in an economy with one public good one private good and quasi linear utilities we explore decision making mechanisms to non cooperatively implement an efficient outcome by auctioning the leadership role among agents one implements egalitarianism namely the efficient outcome that distributes equally the surplus available from an a priori given status quo a refinement of this mechanism so called autioning the leadership with differentiated buds allows us to implement an efficient anonymous and neutral outcome it achieves egalitarianism above the vickrey clarke groves decision

the political economy of agricultural credit the case of bolivi a theoretical framework is established to show that agricultural credit programs in less developed countries can be used for political purposes because of a government controlled supply b implicit income transfers associated with concessionary interest rates delinquency and inflation that can be used as patronage for politically influential borrowers and c ease of implementation under guise of economic objectives the framework is applied to bolivia within that country s political context large income transfers to a few influential farmers strongly suggest the importance of political factors in credit allocation with consequent effects on income distribution development and debilitation of financial institutions

learning dynamics for mechanism design an experimental comparison of public goods mechanisms in a repeated interaction public goods economy incomplete information and dynamic behavior may affect the realized outcomes of mechanisms known to be efficient in a complete information oneshot game an experimental test of five public goods mechanisms indicates that subjects with private information appear to best respond to recent observations this provides predictions about which mechanisms will generate convergence to their efficient equilibrium allocations these predictions match the experimental result that globally stable efficient mechanisms realize the highest efficiency in practice the simplicity of the suggested best response model makes it useful in predicting stability of mechanisms not yet tested

welfare egalitarianism in non rival environments we study equity in economies where a set of agents commonly own a technology producing a non rival good from their private contributions a social ordering function associates to each economy a complete ranking of the allocations we build social ordering functions satisfying the property that individual welfare levels exceeding a legitimate upper bound should be reduced combining that property with efficiency and robustness properties with respect to changes in the set of agents we obtain a kind of welfare egalitarianism based on a constructed numerical representation of individual preferences

modeling asymmetric competition the effects of the marketing actions of one brand can be distributed among its competitors market shares in a complex manner this paper presents and illustrates methods for modeling brand competition and brand strategies in markets where competitive effects can be differentially and asymmetrically distributed we discuss the empirical specification parameter estimation and competitive strategy implications of the models proposed price and advertising competition among eleven brands of an australian household product is used to illustrate the application of these procedures

competition and cooperation within a multidivisional firm the strategic choice of managerial incentives is studied in a multiagent setting using a two stage game in the first stage the principal chooses incentive schemes then agents make their decisions the game models the structure of multidivisional firms divisions agents are managed independently but the general office principal monitors their performance and provides incentives it explains the rationale for establishing either cooperation or competition across divisions if firms face cournot competition if divisions are linked because of technological reasons positive spillovers cooperation should be stimulated if they sell substitute products negative spillovers competition is needed copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

an application of the shapley value to fair division with money the author considers fair division when monetary compensations are feasible and utilities are quasi linear four axioms are discussed individual rationality resource monotonicity population solidarity and the stand alone test the latter views the utility from consuming all the goods as an upper bound on every coalition s actual joint utility under efficiency the four axioms show little compatibility however when the goods have enough substitutability in everyone s preferences the shapley value of the surplus sharing game satisfies all four axioms an example is the optimal assignment of indivisible goods when every agent consumes only one good copyright 1992 by the econometric society

contracting and information sharing under supply chain competition we investigate contracting and information sharing in two competing supply chains each consisting of one manufacturer and one retailer the two supply chains are identical except they may have di

managing demand and sales dynamics in new product diffusion under supply constraint the bass diffusion model is a well known parametric approach to estimating new product demand trajectory over time this paper generalizes the bass model by allowing for a supply constraint in the presence of a supply constraint potential customers who are not able to obtain the new product join the waiting queue generating backorders and potentially reversing their adoption decision resulting in lost sales consequently they do not generate the positive word of mouth that is typically assumed in the bass model leading to significant changes in the new product diffusion dynamics we study how a firm should manage its supply processes in a new product diffusion environment with backorders and lost sales we consider a make to stock production environment and use optimal control theory to establish that it is never optimal to delay demand fulfillment this result is interesting because immediate fulfillment may accelerate the diffusion process and thereby result in a greater loss of customers in the future using this result we derive closed form expressions for the resulting demand and sales dynamics over the product life cycle we then use these expressions to investigate how the firm should determine the size of its capacity and the time to market its new product we show that delaying a product launch to build up an initial inventory may be optimal and can be used as a substitute for capacity also the optimal time to market and capacity increase with the coefficients of innovation and imitation in the adoption population we compare our optimal capacity and time to market policies with those resulting from exogeneous demand forecasts in order to quantify the value of endogenizing demand

managerial incentives and the price effects of mergers most analysis of market power assumes that managers are perfect agents for shareholders this paper relaxes that assumption when managers of a multi product firm exert unobservable effort to improve product quality there is a trade off between providing adequate effort incentives and ensuring sufficient price coordination between the product divisions this makes some intra firm price competition optimal explaining why many multi product firms allow for competition between divisions when there are effort spillovers the optimal amount of price competition can be as great as when the products are under separate ownership even with some profit sharing intra firm price competition can reduce quality adjusted price which has important implications for antitrust policy

strategic decentralization in channels the purpose of this paper is to understand the effect of strategic interaction on a manufacturer s channel structure decision in the model i analyze if there were no strategic interaction then the manufacturer would prefer vertical integration to decentralization with strategic interaction however decentralization can be a nash equilibrium strategy as mcguire and staein mcguire timothy richard staelin 1983a an industry equilibrium analysis of downstream vertical integration marketing sci 2spring 161 192 showed so the question arises what is it about strategic interaction that makes decentralization a nash equilibrium strategy the answer i give is that strategic interaction makes it possible for a manufacturer s retail demand curve to rise when he decentralizes i show that this raising of the demand curve on decentralization can happen only if one of the following mutually exclusive conditions is satisfied 1 the manufacturers products are demand substitutes at the retail level and strategic complements at the manufacturer or retailer levels 2 the manufacturer s products are demand complements at the retail level and strategic substitutes at the manufacturer or retailer levels strategic complementarity at the retailer manufacturer level means that if one retailer manufacturer raises his price then the other retailer manufacturer would raise his price as well strategic substitutability is just the opposite these results show that what is important for decentralization to occur is not how demand substitutable the two manufacturers products are as one might have thought from earlier works in the literature but rather the nature of coupling between demand dependence and strategic dependence

the pure compensation problem egalitarianism versus laissez fairism a binary choice problem with side payments and quasi linear utilities is considered we study two compensation rules called social choice functions the egalitarian rule divides equally the surplus above the average utility level the laissez faire rule chooses an efficient decision but performs no transfer egalitarianism is characterized by a monotonicity axiom called agreement no two agents ever disagree in comparing two distinct preferences of a third one laissez fairism is characterized by the no subsidy axiom a coalition would not be worse off if the other agents were not present

the value of transparency in multidivisional firms we study internal incentives transparency and firm performance in multidivisional organizations two independent divisions of the same firm design internal incentives and decide whether to publicly disclose their performances in each division a risk neutral principal deals with a risk averse exclusive agent under moral hazard each agent exerts an unverifiable effort that creates a spillover on the effort cost of the other agent we first study the determinants of the optimal principal agent contract with and without performance transparency then we show how effort spillovers affect the equilibrium communication behavior of each division both principals commit to disclose the performance of their agents in equilibrium when efforts are complements while no communication is the only equilibrium outcome when efforts are substitutes

non excludable public good experiments we conduct a two stage game experiment with a non excludable public good in the first stage two subjects choose simultaneously whether or not they commit to contributing nothing to provide a pure public good in the second stage knowing the other subject s commitment decision subjects who did not commit in the first stage choose contributions to the public good we found no support for the evolutionary stable strategy equilibrium and the ratio of subjects who did not commit to contributing nothing increased as periods advanced that is the free riding rate declined over time furthermore this behavior did not arise due to altruism or kindness among subjects but from spiteful behavior of subjects

strategic r d with spillovers collusion and welfare the author considers a two stage r d then output or price duopoly game in which r d spills over so reducing the marginal cost of both the investing firm and its rival the author compares the noncooperative regime to three collusive regimes joint venture collusion on r d price fixing collusion at the price or output stage and merger collusion at both stages and evaluates under what circumstances a collusive regime improves welfare if spillovers are sufficiently large all three regimes are beneficial although mergers are more likely and price fixing less likely to produce specific benefits than are joint ventures copyright 1994 by blackwell publishing ltd

a voluntary participation game with a non excludable public good faculty of economics tokyo metropolitan university hachioji tokyo 192 0397 japanyamato takehiko c metro u ac jpreceived november 14 1997 revised august 21 1998in the previous mechanism design on public goods it was implicitly assumed thatevery agent must participate in the mechanism that the designer provides thisapproach neglects non excludability of public goods we explicitly incorporatenon excludability and examine a two stage game with voluntary participation inthe first stage each agent simultaneously decides whether she participates in themechanism or not and in the second stage knowing the other agents participationdecisions the agents who selected participation in the first stage choose theirstrategies participation of all agents is not an equilibrium in many situations journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d71 d78 h41

coordinating investment production and subcontracting we value the option of subcontracting to improve financial performance and system coordination by analyzing a competitive stochastic investment game with recourse the manufacturer and subcontractor decide separately on their capacity investment levels then demand uncertainty is resolved and both parties have the option to subcontract when deciding on their production and sales we analyze and present outsourcing conditions for three contract types 1 price only contracts where an ex ante transfer price is set for each unit supplied by the subcontractor 2 incomplete contracts where both parties negotiate over the subcontracting transfer and 3 state dependent price only and incomplete contracts for which we show an equivalence result while subcontracting with these three contract types can coordinate production decisions in the supply system only state dependent contracts can eliminate all decentralization costs and coordinate capacity investment decisions the minimally sufficient price only contract that coordinates our supply chain specifies transfer prices for a small number 6 in our model of contingent scenarios our game theoretic model allows the analysis of the role of transfer prices and of the bargaining power of buyer and supplier we find that sometimes firms may be better off leaving some contract parameters unspecified ex ante and agreeing to negotiate ex post also a price focused strategy for managing subcontractors can backfire because a lower transfer price may decrease the manufacturer s profit finally as with financial options the option value of subcontracting increases as markets are more volatile or more negatively correlated

observable contracts strategic delegation and cooperation the role of commitments in noncooperative games is well acknowledged and documented one way to achieve commitments is by letting delegates represent the players of a game in this paper the authors study a delegation game in which the players can use agents strategically to play on their behalf and the contracts they sign with them are common knowledge they show that in such cases every pareto optimal outcome of the game can become the unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium of the delegation game the authors demonstrate this result by discussing the cournot type duopolistic game copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

hypercompetition in a multimarket environment the role of strategic similarity and multimarket contact in competitive de escalation the effect of intra industry heterogeneity on hypercompetitive escalation and de escalation in a multimarket environment is examined the authors study two critical dimensions of intra industry heterogeneity strategic similarity which captures similarity in competitive orientation and multimarket contact which captures the degree of overlap between rivals in the multiple markets of the industry theory predicts that both variables influence the intensity of rivalry and competitive disruption the predictions in the literature about the effect of strategic similarity on the intensity of rivalry are mixed while strategic group theory proposes that strategic similarity may lead to lower rivalry other theories focusing on product differentiation the resource based view of the firm and hypercompetitive escalation predict that strategic similarity may actually increase rivalry those diametrically opposed propositions are captured as alternative hypotheses of the effect of strategic similarity with r

optimal vcg mechanisms to assign multiple bads for the problem of assigning economic bads for example costly tasks or undesirable objects vickrey clarke groves vcg mechanisms achieve efficient allocations via money transfers however they can produce arbitrarily large budget surpluses or deficits we construct a performance index for a vcg mechanism to measure its budget surplus and deficit in the worst case using this index we develop mechanisms whose surpluses or deficits vanish as the number of participants increases for both cases of bads and goods we find that individual rationality creates an asymmetry between surplus and deficit particularly in the case of bads when the number of agents is large enough a minute amount of deficit can replace unit surplus to achieve a budget balance for the case of economic goods unit surplus can only be replaced with unit deficit regardless of individual rationality this result shows that the model with bads differs fundamentally from the model with goods

predicting advertising pulsing policies in an oligopoly a model and empirical test given that firms pulse in advertising should firms pulse in or out of phase it is shown that out of phase maximizes the oligopoly profits and is also the markov perfect equilibrium of the infinite horizon game the basic intuition for this result comes from the following fact it is more profitable to increase consideration when the competitor s consideration is lower evidence from several product categories seems to support this theoretical result

characterizations of the pivotal mechanism the pivotal mechanism is strategyproof demand revealing in public decision problems where preferences are quasi linear moreover no agent has an incentive to free ride by withdrawing from the committee and consuming whatever decision is taken by the remaining agents strategyproofness plus no free ride characterize the pivotal mechanism this mechanism is anonymous and neutral yet together strategyproofness anonymity and neutrality do not characterize it they will however if reasonable lower or upper bounds on final utilities are imposed our last characterization of the pivotal mechanism uses the no free ride axiom and two mild monotonicity properties but not strategyproofness

information sharing between vertical hierarchies abstract when do principals independently choose to share the information obtained from their privately informed agents information sharing affects contracting within competing organizations and induces agents strategies to be correlated through the distortions imposed by principals to obtain information we show that the incentives to share information depend on the nature of upstream externalities between principals and the correlation of agents information with small externalities principals share information when externalities and correlation have opposite signs and do not share information when externalities and correlation have the same sign in this second case principals face a prisoners dilemma since they obtain higher profits by sharing information

delayed formal credit bribing and the informal credit market in agriculture a theoretical analysis abstract the paper presents a theory of interest rate determination in the informal credit market in backward agriculture the market for informal credit is created by the delay in disbursement of formal credit the delay is controlled by the official of the formal credit agency and he is bribed by the farmer to reduce the delay the official and the moneylender play a non cooperative game in choosing the bribing rate and the informal interest rate respectively the informal sector interest rate and the effective formal sector interest rate incorporating the bribe are equal in equilibrium agricultural price and credit subsidy policies may raise the interest rate in the informal credit market

inter firm cooperation with imperfectly appropriable research abstract inter firm collaboration in pre competitive research is not always beneficial rather its effectiveness in raising social benefits relative to a non cooperative setup depends on both the nature of the agreement and the technological and market conditions of the industry in question joint ventures that simply allow members to coordinate their actions in pre competitive research can restore firm incentives for both pre competitive research and development in the presence of high knowledge spillovers and poor opportunities for innovation joint ventures which additionally improve the dissemination of information among member firms raise social benefits whenever the opportunities for innovation are not exceptionally good even in the presence of relatively insignificant spillovers

the global stability of efficient intertemporal allocations this paper describes a continuous time model of an economy with finitely many infinitely lived consumers and a finite number of capital goods two objectives are achieved first recursive nonadditive utility functionals are formulated and analyzed second these preference functionals are applied to analyze the nature of efficient allocations in a dynamic economy two classes of global turnpike propositions are proven which provide the basis for a model of the long run distribution of wealth these propositions also provide new perspective regarding existing stability literature based on additive utilities copyright 1987 by the econometric society

the impact of competition on make or buy decisions evidence from the spanish local tv industry this paper empirically investigates whether changes in product market competition affect firm boundaries exploiting regulation induced shocks to entry barriers and differences in regulation enforcement across cities to obtain exogenous variation in competition we establish a negative causal effect of competition through reduced entry barriers and a larger number of rival firms on vertical integration in the setting of the spanish local television industry between 1995 and 2002 data and the online appendix are available at https doi org 10 1287 mnsc 2016 2633 this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

organizational design and the intensity of rivalry we analyze the effect of managerial compensation schemes and organizational structure on competitive behavior in imperfectly competitive product markets previous research suggests that in cases of strategic substitutability firms tend to choose organizational structures and compensation systems that commit the firm to behaving aggressively in the product market reducing firm and industry profits in contrast we show that while compensation and structure in isolation lead to excessive aggressiveness the combination of these two internal choice variables may reverse the outcome organizational design can be used as a commitment device to reduce competitive rivalry finally we find that in equilibrium firms may choose to be different one firm is decentralized and uses incentives that commit it to being aggressive while the other is centralized and uses incentives that commit it to being soft hence endogenous firm heterogeneity in the form of organizational differentiation allows firms to avoid a mutually detrimental outcome

user delay costs and internal pricing for a service facility this paper studies optimal pricing and capacity decisions for a service facility in an environment where users delay cost is important the model assumes a general nonlinear delay cost structure and incorporates the tradeoff between the delay cost and capacity cost we find necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a pricing rule that charges out service resources at their marginal capacity cost we examine the issue of budgetary balance and find that net value maximization entails a budget deficit for the service facility that is the service facility should be evaluated as a deficit center the results provide guidelines under which the optimal magnitude of the deficit can be determined

duopoly information equilibrium cournot and bertrand abstract in a duopoly model where firms have private information about an uncertain linear demand it is shown that if the goods are substitutes not to share information is a dominant strategy for each firm in bertrand cournot competition if the goods are complements the result is reversed furthermore the following welfare results are obtained 1 i with substitutes in cournot competition the market outcome is never optimal with respect to information sharing but it may be optimal in bertrand competition if the products are good substitutes with complements the market outcome is always optimal 2 ii bertrand competition is more efficient than cournot competition 3 iii the private value of information to the firms is always positive but the social value of information is positive in cournot and negative in bertrand competition

allocating spending between advertising and information technology in electronic retailing this study examines coordination issues that occur in allocating spending between advertising and information technology it in electronic retailing electronic retailers run the risk of overspending on advertising to attract customers but underspending on it thus resulting in inadequate processing capacity at the firm s website in this paper we present a centralized joint marketing it model to optimally allocate spending between advertising and it and we discuss an uncoordinated case where marketing and it make suboptimal advertising and capacity decisions we show how these decisions can be coordinated either by reducing the value of a customer session or by designing an optimal processing contract between marketing and it both the coordination methods can be implemented with only local knowledge of the it function yet they generate a solution that almost matches the quality of the centralized solution we extend our basic model to consider demand uncertainty lagged advertising effects and uncertainties in the lead time to acquire it capacity with demand uncertainty electronic retailers should reduce spending on advertising and increase it capacity if there is potential for a demand upswing and the cost of it capacity is relatively low the value of a customer session should be further reduced when uncertainties exist this is required to share the risk of excess or inadequate it capacity

an industry equilibrium analysis of downstream vertical integration this paper investigates the effect of product substitutability on nash equilibrium distribution structures in a duopoly where each manufacturer distributes its goods through a single exclusive retailer which may be either a franchised outlet or a factory store static linear demand and cost functions are assumed and a number of rules about players expectations of competitors behavior are examined it is found that for most specifications product substitutability does influence the equilibrium distribution structure for low degrees of substitutability each manufacturer will distribute its product through a company store for more highly competitive goods manufacturers will be more likely to use a decentralized distribution system this article was originally published in marketing science volume 2 issue 2 pages 161 191 in 1983

retail contracting theory and practice we summarize a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on contractual relationships between manufacturers and their exclusive resellers we do this using studies of traditional and business format franchise relationships as well as studies of salesforce integration decisions some of the patterns that we uncover are consistent with a standard incentive cum insurance theory of organization while others are not we brie y review some theoretical extensions that seem promising in terms of reconciling seeming con icts between theory and practice i introduction manufacturers of retail products must decide whether to sell their products to consumers themselves vertical integration or to sell via independent retailers vertical separation when manufacturers do not perform the sales function internally but want exclusive retailers they usually choose some form of franchising 1 many theories attempt to explain the choice of retail organizational form moreover a considerable body of empirical evidence concerning this choice is accumulating we attempt to evaluate this econometric evidence and relate it to the theories to accomplish this task we assess studies of franchising arrangements as well as studies of sales force organization in industrial settings the paper is organized as follows in the next section we highlight a number of regularities that arise in the empirical literature on retail contracting in particular we nd that i risk is positively related to the use of high powered incentives vertical separation ii the importance of the agent s eiort in production is positively related to the use of high powered incentives

on evaluation costs in strategic factor markets the implications for competition and organizational design this paper uses a formal model to study how evaluation costs affect competition for resources in strategic factor markets it finds that relative scarcity may not always benefit resource sellers rather when competition among resource investors passes a certain threshold intensity miscoordination among investors increases to the point that sellers expected profits decline this paper extends the model to consider how investors organize to overcome managerial agency in resource evaluation two organizational designs are considered a incentivization wherein a lower level manager is motivated by an incentive contract to evaluate resources for an investor and b supervision wherein evaluation is either handled directly or closely monitored by headquarters the model suggests that competition among investors will be associated with a greater use of supervision and that investors using supervision will tend to make lower offers this paper also finds that supervision will be more common when valuable resources are rare this paper was accepted by bruno cassiman business strategy

the strategic choice of managerial incentives do firms with separate owners and managers maximize profits we address this question for an oligopoly where managers compete in quantities or prices as in the cournot or bertrand models and owners choose their managers incentives we find that there is a strategic aspect in the problem of selecting incentives and that profit maximizing behavior does not result in particular in the oligopoly we study the behavior of firms competing in quantity price more closely resembles perfectly competitive collusive behavior than cournot bertrand behavior

asymmetric information incentives and intrafirm resource allocation this paper considers the question how should a firm allocate a resource among divisions when the productivity of the resource in each division is known only to the division manager obviously if the divisions as represented by their managers are indifferent among various allocations of the resource the headquarters can simply request the division managers to reveal their private information on productivity knowing that the managers have no incentive to lie the resource allocation problem can then be solved under complete or at least symmetric information this aspect is a flaw in much of the recent literature on this topic i e there is nothing in the models considered which makes divisions prefer one allocation over another thus although in some cases elaborate allocation schemes are proposed and analyzed they are really unnecessary in the model we develop a division can produce the same output with less managerial effort if it is allocated more resources and effort is costly to the manager we further assume that this effort is unobservable by the headquarters so that it cannot infer divisional productivity from data on divisional output and managerial effort given these assumptions we seek an optimal resource allocation process our results show that certain types of transfer pricing schemes are optimal in particular if there are no potentially binding capacity constraints on production of the resource then an optimal process is for each division to choose a transfer price from a schedule announced by the headquarters division managers receive a fixed compensation minus the cost of the resource allocated to them at the chosen transfer price resources are allocated on the basis of the chosen transfer prices if there is a potentially binding constraint on resource production a somewhat more complicated but similar scheme is required

on manufacturing marketing incentives stereotypically marketing is mainly concerned about satisfying customers and manufacturing is mainly interested in factory efficiency using the principal agent agency paradigm which assumes that the marketing and manufacturing managers of the firm will act in their self interest we seek incentive plans that will induce those managers to act so that the owner of the firm can attain as much as possible of the residual returns one optimal incentive plan can be interpreted as follows the owner subcontracts to pay the manufacturing manager a fixed rate for all capacity he delivers each marketing manager receives all of the returns from his product in turn all managers pay a fixed fee to the owner under this plan the marketing managers will often complain about the stock level decisions even though these levels are announced in advance under a revised plan the owner can eliminate such complaints by delegating the stocking decisions to the respective marketing managers without any loss this plan is interpreted as requiring the owner to make a futures market for manufacturing capacity paying the manufacturing manager the expected marginal value for each unit of capacity delivered receiving the realized marginal value from the marketing managers and losing money on average in the process

the separability axiom and equal sharing methods a quasi linear social choice problem is defined as selecting one among finitely many indivisible public decision and a vector of monetary transfers among agents to cover the cost of this decision this decision is based upon individual preferences which are assumed to be additively separable and linear in money the separability axiom is a consistency property for choice methods on societies with variable size the decision is not affected if we remove an arbitrary agent under the condition that he be guaranteed his original utility level and the cost to the remaining agents is modified accordingly thus the utility level assigned by the social choice function to agent i is the price at which the other agents are unanimously willing to buy agent is share of the decision power a general characterization of choice methods satisfying this axiom is provided three subclasses of particular interest are characterized by additional milder axioms those are i equal sharing of the surplus left over some reference utility e g the utility at a status quo decision ii utilitarian methods that merely select the efficient public decision and perform no monetary transfers and iii equal allocation of nonseparable costs which divides equally the surplus left over from the utility derived from the pivotal mechanism also known as the vickrey clarke groves mechanism

a multi task principal agent approach to organizational form this paper studies the choice of organizational forms in a multi task principal agent model we compare a functional organization in which the firm is organized into functional departments such as marketing and r d to a product based organization in which the firm is organized into product lines managers compensation can be based on noisy measures of product line profits measures of a functional area s contribution to total profits are not available however this effect favors the product organization however if there are significant asymmetries between functional area contributions to organizational success and cross product externalities within functions organizing along functional lines may dominate the product organization the functional organization can also dominate when a function is characterized by strong externalities while the other is not

r d cooperation and product market competition abstract i derive equilibria that is self enforcing agreements for firms that cooperate in improving their product and compete in marketing it i am particularly interested in the interaction between rd ii product improvement is a function of the effort by each firm iii firms cannot observe each other s effort iv firms market the product by simultaneously setting prices the analysis reveals some surprising results i find that in some cases although monopoly prices can be sustained in equilibrium optimal equilibria call for firms to set lower than monopoly prices in the short run thus providing the right incentives for investment in r d under a different set of assumptions i find that it is optimal to reduce r d effort below the efficient level as a means to sustain short run collusion in prices even though efficient r d effort could be achieved in equilibrium

all sorry to disagree a general principle for the provision of non rival goods a group of agents with identical rights but different preferences share the cost of a public good in a situation where each agent is held responsible for his own preferences the principle says that nobody can benefit from the difference between his and other agents preferences all are sorry to disagree this axiom is incompatible with the pay according to benefits approach and in particular with lindahl pricing methods however it is compatible with foley s stand alone core constraints the author s axiom unlike the stand alone properties applies to any number of public goods or bads and to arbitrary public decisions copyright 1992 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

egalitarian equivalent cost sharing of a public good in an economy with one public and one private good egalitarian equivalent cost sharing consists of finding the highest public good level x such that consuming x for free yields a feasible utility distribution the corresponding feasible allocation typically unique called egalitarian equivalent is in the core of the economy conversely any cost sharing method satisfying pareto optimality cost monotonicity nobody suffers a utility loss if the production technology improves upon ceteris paribus and individual rationality no single agent coalition objects or no private transfers no agent receives a positive amount of private good must select an egalitarian equivalent allocation in every economy copyright 1987 by the econometric society

aggregation and linearity in the provision of intertemporal incentives we consider the problem of providing incentives over time for an agent with constant absolute risk aversion the optimal compensation scheme is found to be a linear function of a vector of n accounts which count the number of times that each of the n kinds of observable events occurs the number n is independent of the number of time periods so the accounts may entail substantial aggregation in a continuous time version of the problem the agent controls the drift rate of a vector of accounts that is subject to frequent small random fluctuations the solution is as if the problem were the static one in which the agent controls only the mean of a multivariate normal distribution and the principal is constrained to use a linear compensation rule if the principal can observe only coarser linear aggregates such as revenues costs or profits the optimal compensation scheme is then a linear function of those aggregates the combination of exponential utility normal distributions and linear compensation schemes makes computations and comparative statics easy to do as we illustrate we interpret our linearity results as deriving in part from the richness of the agent s strategy space which makes it possible for the agent to undermine and exploit complicated nonlinear functions of the accounting aggregates

the theory of moral hazard and unobservable behaviour part i principal agent models are studied in which outcomes conditional on the agent s action are uncertain and the agent s behaviour therefore unobservable for a model with bounded agent s utility conditions are given under which the first best equilibrium can be approximated arbitrarily closely by contracts relating payment to observable outcomes for general models it is shown that the solution may not always be obtained by using the agent s first order conditions as constraint general conditions of lagrangean type are given for problems in which contracts are finite dimensional 1 the moral hazard situation

incentives information and organizational form we model an organization as a hierarchy of managers erected on top of a technology here consisting of a collection of plants in our framework the role of a manager is to take steps to reduce the adverse consequences of shocks that affect the plants beneath him we argue that different organizational forms give rise to different information about managers performance and therefore differ according to how effective incentives can be in encouraging a good performance in particular we show that under certain assumptions the m form multi divisional form is likely to provide better incentives than the u form unitary form because it promotes yardstick competition i e relative performance evaluation more effectively we conclude by presenting evidence that the assumptions on which this comparison rests are satisfied for chinese data

information sharing in common agency when is transparency good when should principals dealing with a common agent share their individual performance measures about the agent s unobservable effort for producing a public good in a model with two principals who offer linear incentive schemes we show that information sharing always increases total expected welfare if the principal who is less informed about the agent s effort also cares more about the agent s output if the less informed principal cares somewhat but not too much less than the other principal about the agent s output information sharing reduces total expected welfare in our model the efficient information regime emerges as an equilibrium outcome

rural credit markets and institutions in developing countries lessons for policy analysis from practice and modern theory this article presents evidence of the failure of government intervention in rural credit markets of ldcs in the past three decades it then shows how lessons for policy analysis can be drawn from modern theory particularly those theories focussing on credit rationing in competitive markets and interlinking of credit contracts with labor and land contracts the article outlines the policy implications of these theories and finds them insufficient to account for the empirical evidence it contends that a more systematic and rigorous analysis of institutions and institutional environments is essential for understanding and implementing effective policy reforms of rural credit markets it presents suggestions for undertaking such an analysis

should multiproduct firms provide divisional or corporate incentives abstract this paper points out some of the implications of the internal organization of a multiproduct firm for its market conduct in particular we study the strategic use of organizational forms based on corporate incentives versus forms based on divisional incentives the equilibrium internal organization is determined in a model with full information it is shown that firms provide corporate incentives when goods are substitutes and divisional incentives when goods are complements and the result holds both in the case of quantity setting and price setting

welfare bounds in the cooperative production problem a general model of lower bound individual rationality and upper bound axioms for fair allocation is proposed the unanimity welfare function associates to each individual utility function the highest equal utility feasibile when all agents share this utility if this function is a feasible lower bound resp upper bound then it is the highest lower bound of all resp the lower upper bound applying this to cooperative production of private goods we characterize when the unanimity welfare is a lower upper bound function and when the stand alone welfare is an upper or lower bound our approach unifies several familiar fairness properties

some implications of growth for organizational form and ownership structure building on previous modeling of the separation between formal and real authority in organizations the paper investigates some implications of growth for the scope of integration and the internal organization of firms it stresses the role of headquarters overload and the differential and unmeasured cost of internal and external units in terms of their use of a scarce corporate resource namely headquarters attention the paper first shows how growth or other factors leads to restructuring for example through spin offs move of units to the periphery and refocus on core competencies it then looks at the internal allocation of tasks and studies whether overload considerations may induce a firm to create profit centers and abandon a functional or unitary form u form in favor of a multidivisional form m form

a proposal to unify some concepts in the theory of fairness so far the theory of distributive justice has tried to single out a unique criterion of justice in our opinion we live in a world in which different people hold conflicting ideas about justice we propose a procedure for representing these individual opinions by means of what we call aspiration functions and we present in this paper three different ways of aggregating such opposing opinions into a socially acceptable judgement furthermore we show that many well known concepts are special cases of our approach we study under a restriction on the form of the aspiration functions the conditions that are necessary and sufficient for a social choice correspondence to be generated from any of our concepts

a critique of traditional agricultural credit projects and policies abstract authors critique the results assumptions and policies commonly associated with agricultural credit projects in low income countries a summary of new views on these projects is present these views emphasize voluntary savings mobilization and positive real rates of interest several explanations are given for why few of these new views have been adopted by policymakers

divisionalization and entry deterrence this paper assumes that incumbent firms can create new independent divisions more cheaply than potential entrants who must incur the additional overhead costs of new entry the main theoretical result is that such divisionalization ability leads perfectly informed incumbents to preempt all rational entry into their industries in contrast existing models of entry deterrence imply that informed incumbents even those with steadily decreasing average costs will often allow rational entry our result may explain why successful large scale entry by firms with no informational advantage is extremely rare the use of divisions to preempt entry may also explain why large firms in high profit oligopolies often divisionalize allowing their divisions to compete freely despite the negative pecuniary externality that each division imposes on others