the china model withering institutional roots of china s local developmentalism china s new development wave since the mid 1990s is distinguishable by its strong urbanism urban governments particularly at municipal and county levels rushed to build industrial parks urban l

nonlinear pricing in an oligopoly market the case of specialty coffee firms that use nonlinear pricing may distort product characteristics away from their efficient levels this paper offers the first empirical study of this issue using data from a specialty coffee market i estimate a structural utility model to compute consumers benefits from changing products sizes i then compare the estimated benefits to cost data design distortions are relatively large for products not targeted to the highest demand consumers distortions decrease toward zero with drink size for products with the largest profit margins these results support some of the central predictions from nonlinear pricing theory including no distortion at the top

inferring market power under the threat of entry the case of the brazilian cement industry consider a setting where threatened rather than actual import competition restrains a domestic oligopoly s prices i show that not modelling the entry threat may underestimate the true degree of market power as incumbents blunted price responses to demand shocks resemble perfectly competitive behavior evidence from brazilian cement markets points to an important role for imports in determining domestic cement prices despite the near absence of imports on assuming autarky models with market power are rejected in favor of competition among incumbents however allowing a role for imports rejects the autarky assumption and precludes one from rejecting the presence of market power

trade disputes and the implementation of protection under the gatt an empirical assessment abstract this paper is a first attempt to empirically determine why countries choose to violate or adhere to gatt rules when making trade policy adjustments between negotiating rounds we use a previously unexploited set of data in which countries implemented two types of protection under the gatt system between 1973 and 1994 i legal protection in which countries utilized the gatt s safeguards provisions and ii illegal protection in which the protection was provided outside of the safeguards provisions resulting in a formal trade dispute we find substantial evidence that concerns for retaliation affect government policy decisions in ways which contribute to the explanation of the existence of trade disputes

building new plants or entering by acquisition firm heterogeneity and entry barriers in the u s cement industry i estimate a model of entry for the cement industry that considers two options of expansion building a plant or acquiring an incumbent the model takes into account that there is a transfer of the buyer firm level characteristics to the acquired plants which affects profits from the acquisition estimates show that a less permissive reagan bush administration s merger policy would decrease the number of acquired plants by 71 greenfield entry would increase by 9 2 and consumer surplus would decrease by 23 5 results suggest that regulators should be concerned about policies that negatively affect the efficient reallocation of assets between incumbents and entrants

trade policy in a super size me world abstract when a foreign monopolist sets a single market clearing price for its product the sign of the optimal tariff is determined by the extent of pass through also known as the terms of trade effect however when a foreign monopolist employs a second degree price discrimination mechanism in the domestic market the calculus of welfare maximization is very different while there are still terms of trade effects from the imposition of a tariff the existence of such effects are neither necessary nor sufficient to determine the sign of the optimal tariff instead the distribution of valuations within the population is the key determinant of the nature of policy intervention this result differs significantly from the uniform price case and is driven by the incentive compatibility constraint which places the distribution of types at the center of the analysis if there is a relatively large fraction of high valuation types in the population then domestic information rents may be increased by subsidizing imports thereby increasing the consumption of the low valuation types and moving the incentive constraint in favor of the high valuation types however if the share of high types in the population is relatively small then the increase in information rents will also be small but the fiscal implications of a subsidy will be large consequently the optimal policy will be to impose a trade tax

rules communication and collusion narrative evidence from the sugar institute case detailed notes on weekly meetings of the sugar refining cartel show how communication helps firms collude and so highlight the deficiencies in the current formal theory of collusion the sugar institute did not fix prices or output prices were increased by homogenizing business practices to make price cutting more transparent meetings were used to interpret and adapt the agreement coordinate on jointly profitable actions ensure unilateral actions were not misconstrued as cheating and determine whether cheating had occurred in contrast to established theories cheating did occur but sparked only limited retaliation partly due to the contractual relations with selling agents jel l13 l41 this paper reexamines the cartel problem by studying the private discussions within one cartel while we find much that is in accord with george j stigler s 1964 basic insight that firms would structure an agreement conscious of their later incentive to cheat on it we also uncover puzzles for established theory and identify elements that a richer theory should encompass especially regarding the role of communication in collusion our window into the inner workings of a cartel is a remarkable series of notes on the weekly meetings of the sugar institute this trade association was formed in december 1927 in the wake of several years of falling margins and excess capacity by 14 firms comprising nearly all the cane sugar refining capacity in the united states it operated until 1936 when the supreme court ruled its practices illegal among the top executives in regular attendance at the meetings was louis v place vice president of mccahan a midsize refinery in philadelphia place who was in charge of all activities of the company except production and raw sugar purchases wrote over 500 pages of single spaced detailed

capacity constraints mergers and collusion abstract the objective of this paper is two fold to contribute to the analysis of tacit collusion in bertrand supergames with asymmetric capacity constraints and from a more applied perspective to bring a new light on merger analysis and provide useful guidelines for competition policy taking into account dynamic aspects of competition it is well known that capacity constraints affect tacit collusion as they limit both incentives to deviate e g to undercut rivals and retaliation possibilities however most studies have so far focused on symmetric situations where all firms have the same capacity which leads to ambiguous and unintuitive results and also considerably limits the scope of application studying asymmetric situations makes it possible to analyse the impact of changes in the distribution of these capacities expansions but also mergers split offs transfers etc and to provide guidelines for competition policy and particularly for merger policy these guidelines which differ substantially from those inspired by more static analyses such as the herfindahl or other standard concentration tests are applied to a famous merger that took place in the french bottled water market the nestle perrier merger case

federalism chinese style the political basis for economic success in china china s remarkable economic success rests on a foundation of political reform providing a considerable degree of credible commitment to markets this reform reflects a special type of institutionalized decentralization that the authors call federalism chinese style this form of decentralization has three consequences first it fosters competition not only in product markets but also among local governments for labor and foreign capital this competition in turn encourages local government experimentation and learning with new forms of enterprises regulation and economic relationships second it provides incentives for local governments to promote local economic prosperity finally it provides a significant amount of protection to local governments and their enterprises from political intrusion by the central government

estimating demand for spatially differentiated firms with unobserved quantities and limited price data extending the circular city model i derive a pricing equation that identifies key structural parameters from one firm s data simulations indicate demand shifters and rotators can be distinguished cost parameters are imprecise and the likeliest specification error biases estimates toward zero

dilemmas of local governance under the development zone fever in china a case study of the suzhou region this article aims to explore the mechanisms of the development zone fever in the suzhou region located in the fast growing yangtze river delta and investigates from an institutional perspective the practice of relevant intragovernmental governance in the context of rapid industrialisation since the 1990s a specific mode of governance the evaluative economic indicators scheme inherited from the earlier socialist planning system combined with the party state s promotion evaluation system plays an essential role in this transformation of farmland property rights however this model of development is not necessarily helpful for local financial conditions and it results in the disclacement of peasants and the loss of land resources based on the resulting dilemmas of governance it is argued that in addition to the economic paradigm which focuses on consequences of fiscal reforms and devolution scholars should pay more attention to factors such as the party state s promotion evaluation system and

price and seller concentration in cement effective oligopoly or misspecified transportation cost abstract a positive correlation between price and seller concentration in cement markets disappears if a different proxy for transportation costs population density is included in the specification

market structure and import share a regional market analysis in this paper we analyze the relationship between domestic market structure and cement importation into the united states we do this by examining the impact of concentration technology scale costs and demand on imports into twenty independent united states regional cement markets for a number of years by looking at only one industry as opposed to importation across several diverse industries we hope to remove inter industry effects that may mask the relationship between import share and selected structural characteristics the use of time series data allows us to examine import response to variations in demand over the business cycle this paper is divided into six sections the next describes the united states portland cement industry including its geographically segmented nature production methods demand conditions and incentives for importation section iii contains a model that relates import shares to market structure the data to estimate this model are discussed in section iv section v contains

endogenous cartel formation with heterogeneous firms in the context of an infinitely repeated capacity constrained price game we endogenize the composition of a cartel when firms are heterogeneous in their capacities when firms are sufficiently patient there exists a stable cartel involving the largest firms a firm with sufficiently small capacity is not a member of any stable cartel when a cartel is not all inclusive colluding firms set a price that serves as an umbrella with non cartel members pricing below it and producing at capacity contrary to previous work our results suggest that the most severe coordinated effects may come from mergers involving moderate sized firms rather than the largest or smallest firms

is the wto passe the wto has delivered policy outcomes that are very different from those likely to emerge out of the recent wave of preferential trade agreements ptas should economists see this as an efficient institutional hand off where the wto has carried trade liberalization as far as it can manage and is now passing the baton to ptas to finish the job this paper surveys a growing economics literature on international trade agreements and argues on this basis that the wto is not passe rather and subject to some caveats this survey of research to date suggests that the wto warrants strong support while a more cautious view of ptas seems appropriate

spatial differentiation and vertical mergers in retail markets for gasoline this paper studies an empirical model of spatial competition applied to gasoline markets the main feature is to specify commuting paths as the locations of consumers in a hotelling style model as a result spatial differentiation depends in an intuitive way on the structure of the road network and the direction of traffic flows the model is estimated using panel data on the quebec city gasoline market and used to evaluate the consequences of a recent vertical merger difference in difference and counterfactual simulation methods are compared and the results to a large extent validate the assumptions of the demand model jel g34 l13 l42 l81 q41 r41

spatial differentiation and price discrimination in the cement industry evidence from a structural model we estimate a structural model of the cement industry that incorporates spatial differentiation and price discrimination focusing on the us southwest over 1983 2003 we leverage the structure of the model to obtain consistent estimates of the underlying parameters using data on market outcomes that are substantially aggregated our results indicate that transportation costs around 0 46 per tonne mile rationalize the data this friction enables relatively isolated plants to obtain higher prices from nearby customers we further find that disallowing price discrimination would create 30 million in consumer surplus annually and show how the model can identify suitable divestitures in merger analysis

spatial pricing spatial rents and spatial welfare this paper presents a model of spatial equilibrium that integrates elements of spatial pricing and tha nen location models properties of equilibrium under mill uniform and discriminatory pricing regimes are explored three comparative propositions concerning firm consumer and landowner welfare that obtain under the alternative pricing schemes are presented the welfare findings contrast with those found in the extant spatial pricing literature in particular the superiority of mill pricing from a consumer welfare perspective is questioned

the mfn clause welfare and multilateral cooperation between countries of unequal size abstract this paper analyzes mfn in a competing exporters model of trade between three countries with unequal endowments and shows that mfn yields higher aggregate welfare than tariff discrimination even as it makes low income countries worse off furthermore in a repeated game of tariff cooperation multilateral free trade is easier to sustain under mfn punishments relative to discriminatory ones this conclusion holds even when tariff discrimination takes the form of bilateral trade agreements overall the analysis shows that from the viewpoint of low income countries mfn and multilateral tariff cooperation are complementary in nature

the discontent cartel member and cartel collapse the case of the german cement cartel we hypothesize a particular source of cartel instability and explore its relevance to understanding cartel dynamics the cartel instability is rooted in the observation that upon cartel formation the relative positions of firms are often fixed which may lead some growthconscious members to be discontent this incongruity between a cartel member s allocated market share and its desired market share may result in systematic deviations and the eventual collapse of the cartel this hypothesis is then taken to the german cement cartel of 1991 2002 we argue that readymix was such a discontent cartel member and using a rich pricing data set are able to characterize how readymix deviated how other firms responded and how it led to the collapse of the cartel

spatial competition with heterogeneous firms i model endogenous horizontal and vertical product differentiation with arbitrarily many heterogeneous firms firms are asymmetric in that they differ in their marginal costs i prove that under an equilibrium refinement all economically relevant firm outcomes are uniquely determined across all strict subgame perfect nash equilibria there are two central results first a firm s price market share and profit are independent of its neighbors marginal costs conditional on the average marginal cost in the market second more productive firms are more isolated all else equal in particular the distance between two firms is strictly decreasing in their average marginal cost

making room for china in the world economy as it comes out of the crisis the world econ omy faces two apparently conflicting demands on the one hand achieving global macroeco nomic stability and preventing a protectionist backlash will require that we avoid large current account imbalances of the type that the world economy experienced in the run up to the cri sis on the other hand returning to rapid growth in the developing nations will require that they resume their conquest of global market share in tradable goods the challenge of meeting both demands is epitomized by the contentious us china bilat eral relationship american and european policy makers blame china for an undervalued renminbi which they argue is the root cause of china s huge trade surplus chinese leaders resist the pressure fearing that appreciation will undercut the competitiveness of chinese goods in world markets hurt exports and damage growth the western answer to this concern is that china needs to replace foreign demand with domestic demand as the engine of growth but if growth depends primarily on the sup ply of modern manufactured products and other tradables as opposed to services and non trad ables as i will argue here the chinese position has more force than critics give it credit the conventional fix for china s current account surplus consisting of a combination of expendi ture expansion and currency appreciation will shift the structure of the economy away from tradables and towards non tradables this may be good for macroeconomic balance in china and elsewhere but it will almost certainly have adverse effects on china s growth perhaps large enough even to endanger the country s social and political stability

applied welfare economics with discrete choice models economists have been paying increasing attention to the study of situations in which consumers face a discrete rather than a continuous set of choices such models are potentially very important in evaluating the impact of government programs upon consumer welfare but very little has been said in general regarding the tools of applied welfare economics indiscrete choice situations this paper shows how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases it focuses on the computation of the excess burden of taxation and the evaluation of quality change the results are applied to stochastic utility models including the popular cases of probit and logit analysis throughout the emphasis is on providing rigorous guidelines for carrying out applied work this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the effect of ownership structure on prices in geographically differentiated industries i analyze how ownership structure and market geography jointly influence fast food prices i estimate a model of demand and supply that accounts for the market geography and run counterfactual experiments that demonstrate how mergers affect prices i find that the impact of mergers can be large that this impact decreases as the merging outlets are farther apart that mergers among market leaders generally increase prices more than mergers among weaker firms and that mergers can increase prices even if the outlets are so far apart that neither outleti s presence affects prices at the other before the merger

mobile money in tanzania in developing countries mobile telecom networks have emerged as major providers of financial services bypassing the sparse retail networks of traditional banks we analyze a large individual level data set of mobile money transactions in tanzania to provide evidence of the impact of mobile money on alleviating financial exclusion in developing countries we identify three types of transactions i money transfers to others ii short distance money self transportation and iii money storage for short to medium periods of time we utilize a natural experiment of an unanticipated increase in transaction fees to identify the demand for these transactions using the demand estimates we find that the willingness to pay to avoid walking with cash an extra kilometer short distance self transportation and to avoid storing money at home money storage for an extra day are 1 25 and 0 8 of an average transaction respectively which demonstrates that mobile money ameliorates significant amounts of crime

measuring market power in the ready to eat cereal industry the ready to eat cereal industry is characterized by high concentration high price cost margins large advertising to sales ratios and numerous introductions of new products previous researchers have concluded that the ready to eat cereal industry is a classic example of an industry with nearly collusive pricing behavior and intense nonprice competition this paper empirically examines this conclusion in particular i estimate price cost margins but more importantly i am able empirically to separate these margins into three sources i that which is due to product differentiation ii that which is due to multi product firm pricing and iii that due to potential price collusion the results suggest that given the demand for different brands of cereal the first two effects explain most of the observed price cost margins i conclude that prices in the industry are consistent with noncollusive pricing behavior despite the high price cost margins leading firms are able to maintain a portfolio of differentiated products and influence the perceived product quality it is these two factors that lead to high price cost margins

what determines cartel success following george stigler 1964 many economists assume that incentive problems undermine attempts by firms to collude to raise prices and restrict output but the potential profits from collusion can create a powerful incentive as well theory cannot tell us a priori which effect will dominate whether or when cartels succeed is thus an empirical question we examine a wide variety of empirical studies of cartels to answer the following questions 1 can cartels succeed 2 if so for how long 3 what impact do cartels have 4 what causes cartels to break up we conclude that many cartels do survive and that the distribution of duration is bimodal while the average duration of cartels across a range of studies is about five years many cartels break up very quickly i e in less than a year but there are many others that last between five and ten years and some that last decades limited evidence suggests that cartels are able to increase prices and profits to varying degrees cartels can also affect other non price variables including advertising innovation investment barriers to entry and concentration cartels break up occasionally because of cheating or lack of effective monitoring but the biggest challenges cartels face are entry and adjustment of the collusive agreement in response to changing economic conditions cartels that develop organizational structures that allow them the flexibility to respond to these changing conditions are more likely to survive price wars that erupt are often the result of bargaining issues that arise in such circumstances sophisticated cartel organizations are also able to develop multipronged strategies to monitor one another to deter cheating and a variety of interventions to increase barriers to entry

political regimes and economic growth arguments that relate regimes to growth focus on property rights pressures for immediate consumption and the autonomy of dictators while everyone seems to agree that secure property rights foster growth it is controversial whether democracies or dictatorships better secure these rights the main mechanism by which democracy is thought to hinder growth is pressure for immediate consumption which reduces investment only states that are institutionally insulated from such pressures can resist them and democratic states are not the main argument against dictatorships is that authoritarian rulers have no interest in maximizing total output these views are summarized in turn

multimarket contact and pricing evidence from the u s cement industry abstract we empirically examine the effect of multimarket contact on pricing in the u s cement industry a model of price and quantity formation is estimated for a panel of 25 regional cement markets over 16 years the results indicate that the divergence of price from marginal cost in a particular market is directly related to the extent of multimarket contact among firms in that market

spatial price policies reconsidered the authors provide a comparison of three spatial price policies uniform pricing mill pricing and spatial price discrimination profits consumer surplus and social surplus are compared in a duopoly model until recently oligopoly analysis has been stalled because of nonexistence of equilibrium through the addition of product heterogeneity using a logit specification existence can be restored and price policies compared in contrast to monopoly analysis consumer surplus is highest under uniform pricing and lowest under mill pricing profit and social surplus follow the opposite ranking government regulation to encourage mill pricing may therefore benefit firms to the detriment of consumers copyright 1989 by blackwell publishing ltd

multilateral trade negotiations bilateral opportunism and the rules of gatt wto abstract trade negotiations occur through time and between the governments of many countries an important issue is thus whether the value of concessions that a government wins in a current negotiation may be eroded in a future bilateral negotiation to which it is not party we identify rules of negotiation that serve to protect the welfare of governments that are not participating in the bilateral negotiation our main finding is that the two central principles of gatt wto nondiscrimination mfn and reciprocity preserve the welfare of nonparticipating governments and therefore offer a first line of defense against bilateral opportunism

pass through in a concentrated industry empirical evidence and regulatory implications we estimate pass through with thirty years of data from a concentrated industry the empirical model accounts for oligopoly interactions yet facilitates estimation with aggregate price data robust statistical evidence supports that industry wide cost changes are more than completely transmitted downstream and that this industry pass through is largely unaected by competitive conditions the industry in question portland cement is a major focus of environmental and antitrust regulators we use our pass through estimates to i evaluate the welfare consequences of marketbased co2 regulation ii predict the magnitude and location of price eects due to a merger under review by antitrust authorities and iii corroborate the simulation based analysis of the epa regarding its impending regulation of local pollutants

the wto as a mechanism for securing market access property rights implications for global labor and environmental issues can the world trade organization wto contribute to the attainment of sound labor and environmental policies an answer requires an understanding of wto rules we argue that the purpose of wto rules is to create a negotiating forum where governments can exchange secure market access commitments from this perspective we argue that supporters of sound trade labor and environmental policies can benefit from a well functioning wto because facilitating trade liberalization and preventing race to the bottom regulatory chill problems go hand in hand and each is accomplished by maintaining secure property rights over negotiated market access commitments

the process of commercialisation of urban housing in china the role of the state in housing has been the subject of controversial debate recently in china more and more decision makers consider that the supply of housing should be left to market forces of demand and supply various new policies have been introduced from as early as 1979 designed to commercialise and reform the public sector dominated housing system this paper provides a review of housing reforms and a systematic account of the key features of the commercialisation process it focuses principally on the attempts to privatise public sector housing in urban areas in the context of the major characteristics and problems of the urban housing system the development of reform policies and legislation and current reform practice

spatial price discrimination with heterogeneous products product heterogeneity is introduced into the context of spatial price discrimination many of the strong properties of the standard homogeneous goods case which are attained as a limit case here are shown to be no longer valid in particular the social optimum is no longer sustainable as a market equilibrium unless products are either identical or else very different

trade flows in a spatial oligopoly gravity fits well but what does it explain large distance and border effects on trade flows in some industries may result from the collusive division of geographic markets in the brazilian cement industry traditional gravity equations fit the data well yet limited regional flows are due to firms strategic behaviour thanks to a unique institutional setting and an unusually rich data set i directly control for trade costs which despite their importance cannot account for the observed segmentation of local markets at current prices the paper highlights how collusive behaviour can magnify the effects of distance as firms use geography to coordinate on higher prices and less cross hauling les effets de grande distance et de frontieres sur les flux de commerce dans certaines industries peuvent etre le resultat d une division collusive des marches geographiques dans l industrie bresilienne du ciment les equations de gravite s ajustent bien aux donnees mais les flux regionaux limites entre regions sont attribuables au comportement strategique des firmes gr ce a un contexte institutionnel unique et a une base de donnees inhabituelles l auteur a pu prendre en compte directement les couts du commerce qui malgre leur importance ne peuvent pas expliquer la segmentation observee des marches locaux aux prix courants le memoire met en lumiere comment le comportement de collusion peut magnifier les effets de distance a proportion que les firmes utilisent la geographie pour assurer une coordination fondee sur des prix plus eleves et moins de transport transfrontalier

price wars and the stability of collusion a study of the pre world war i bromine industry between 1885 and 1914 us bromine producers colluded to raise prices and pro ts this collusion was disrupted by price wars bromine price wars are compared with the green porter and abreu pearce stacchetti models some price wars resulted from the imperfect monitoring problems which motivate these models several empirical implications of the aps model are borne out but the bromine industry s price wars were generally milder than contemplated by aps more severe price wars were part of a bargaining process in which rms tried to force renegotiation to a new collusive equilibrium with a diierent distribution of rents

multi lateral trade negotiations and the most favored nation clause abstract this paper considers the interaction between private information and the most favored nation clause in trade negotiations it demonstrates that by aggregating uncertainty over a number of trading partners the most favored nation clause may offer a welfare improvement over a set of bilateral trade negotiations this improvement is shown to be most pronounced when a large number of countries are involved in negotiations

on the economic success of gatt wto dispute settlement what features of the dispute settlement process help governments live up to their trade liberalization commitments exploiting data on gatt wto trade disputes initiated and completed between 1973 and 1998 this paper identifies economic and institutional determinants that help defendant governments commit to liberalizing trade we find substantial evidence consistent with the theory that power measures including threat of retaliation by the plaintiff yield credibility to allow defendant governments to live up to their commitments we find only limited evidence however that particular procedural or institutional features beyond the basic gatt wto dispute settlement forum itself contributed to the successful economic resolution of trade disputes

spatial price competition a semiparametric approach we investigate the nature of price competition among firms that produce differentiated products and compete in markets that are limited in extent we propose an instrumental variables series estimator for the matrix of cross price response coefficients demonstrate that our estimator is consistent and derive its asymptotic distribution our semiparametric approach allows us to discriminate among models of global competition in which all products compete with all others and local competition in which products compete only with their neighbors we apply our semiparametric estimator to data from u s wholesale gasoline markets and find that in this market competition is highly localized

delivered pricing and multiple basing point equilibria a reevaluation this paper examines delivered pricing with systematic freight absorption in the light of the modern theory of spatial competition delivered pricing multiple basing point equilibria are compared with f o b mill pricing equilibria under a variety of assumptions about market structure and firms conjectural variations it is shown that there is no clear reason for preferring f o b pricing or delivered pricing in the abstract delivered pricing is likely to be preferable from the consumer s standpoint either if the conjectural variations of the firms are high or if conjectural variations are consistent and there are few firms in the industry

trade policy under the gatt wto empirical evidence of the equal treatment rule a fundamental difference between multilateral trade agreements like the gatt and wto and a preferential agreement is the multilateral agreements inclusion of a most favoured nation principle though mfn requires that members implement policies that provide equal treatment to all gatt wto countries how far do members actually follow the mfn principle when so required we empirically investigate a sample of gatt wto trade disputes and the effect of successful dispute settlement negotiations on the disputed product trade of third country exporters to the defendant country we document evidence of trade liberalization consistent with defendant countries successfully applying the equal treatment rule jel classification f13 politique commerciale sous le regime gatt omc resultats empiriques de la regle du traitement equivalent une difference fondamentale entre les accords commerciaux multilateraux comme le gatt ou l omc et un accord preferentiel est que dans le premier cas on fait appel au principe de la nation la plus favorisee meme si ce principe requiert que les membres mettent en place des politiques qui assurent un traitement equivalent a tous les pays de l accord gatt omc reste a savoir jusqu a quel point les membres se soumettent a ce principe quand c est requis ce memoire etudie la question en faisant enquete sur un echantillon de disputes commerciales autour d accords de type gatt omc et sur l effet du succes des negociations dans la resolution de conflit sur le commerce du produit au caeur de la dispute en provenance de pays tiers exportant vers le pays qui se defend on montre que les resultats de la liberalisation du commerce sont consistants avec l application de la regle du traitement equivalent par les pays qui se defendent

trade creation and trade diversion in the canada united states free trade agreement in this paper the changes in trade patterns introduced by the canada united states free trade agreement are examined variation in the extent of tariff liberalization under the agreement is used to identify the impact of tariff liberalization on the growth of trade both with member countries and non member countries data at the commodity level are used and the results indicate that the canada united states free trade agreement had substantial trade creation effects with little evidence of trade diversion jel classification f13 f14

mill pricing versus spatial price discrimination under bertrand and cournot spatial competition this paper asks two questions about spatial competition first does spatial price discrimination lead to lower prices and higher welfare than mill pricing if firms hold the bertrand conjecture the answer is yes for most values of fixed cost but for the cournot conjecture the opposite is true second does the introduction of space into the oligopoly models of bertrand and cournot change their results the answer is generally no however spatial bertrand prices exceed marginal cost unlike their spaceless counterparts these answers are obtained using models of spatial competition of which the cournot mill pricing models are new in spatial competition significant transport costs and economies of scale bestow market power upon firms this paper addresses two questions about spatial competition first does spatial price discrimination yield lower prices and higher social welfare producer plus consumer surplus than fo b mill pricing under spatial price discrimination differences in the delivered prices charged by a firm bear no necessary relationship to differences in transport costs in contrast a mill pricing firm sets a single price at its plant and customers bear the cost of transport this paper answers this question for the cases in which firms adopt the bertrand or cournot conjectures concerning how rivals will react to price and output changes this question is important because of the superficial appeal of mill pricing which stems from its imitation of the spatial structure of marginal costs the presence of spatial price discrimination by contrast is often considered to be evidence of the presence of market power at least in part for these reasons the us robinson patman antitrust act and great britain s price commission favor mill pricing nevertheless spatial price discrimination remains ubiquitous in the us europe and japan greenhut 1981 the second question is how does the introduction of space into the original oligopoly models of cournot and bertrand change their results cournot

automobile prices in market equilibrium with unobserved price discrimination in markets where sellers are able to price discriminate or the buyers to bargain individuals receive discounts over the posted prices that are usually not observed by the econometrician this paper considers the structural estimation of a demand and supply model a la berry et al 1995 when only posted prices are observed we consider that heterogeneous discounts occur due to price discrimination by firms on observable characteristics of consumers within this framework identification is achieved by assuming that the marginal costs of producing and selling the goods do not depend on the characteristics of the buyers we also require a condition relating the posted prices to the prices actually paid for instance we can assume that at least one group of individuals pays the posted prices under these two conditions the demand and supply parameters as well as the exact discounts corresponding to each type of consumers can be identified we apply our methodology to estimate the demand and supply in the new automobile market in france results suggest that discounting arising from price discrimination is important the average discount is estimated to be 10 5 with large variation depending on the buyers characteristics and cars specifications our results are in line with discounts generally observed in european and american automobile markets

on the strategic choice of spatial price policy the strategic incentives with respect to the choice of price policy in spatial competition are analyzed in a duopoly model price discrimination emerges as the unique equilibriu m outcome in games with either simultaneous choice of policy and pric e or sequential choice where firms may commit first to uniform mill p ricing before the actual market stage nevertheless profits may be h igher with uniform pricing the authors models are applied to analyz e some common business practices that arise in geographical pricing like the basing point system and in the pricing of varieties or opti ons from a base product in a product differentiation context copyright 1988 by american economic association

coalition proof nash equilibria ii applications abstract in bernheim peleg and whinston coalition proof equilibria i concepts j econ theory 42 1987 1 12 we proposed the notion of coalition proof nash equilibrium and perfectly coalition proof nash equilibrium as solution concepts for strategic environments in which players can freely discuss their strategies but cannot make binding commitments this paper undertakes applications to several economic problems including the behavior of cournot oligopolists oligopolistic entry deterrence cooperation in finite horizon games and social choice rule implementation