cooperative and noncooperative r d in duopoly with spillovers contrary to the usual assumption made in most oligopoly models relations among firms are seldom of a wholly cooperative or noncooperative type in many situations they compete in some fields while they cooperate in others an important example is the case of cooperative research efforts bringing fierce competitors together two types of agreement are observed first r d cooperation can take place at the so called precompetitive stage companies share basic information and efforts in the r d stage but remain rivals in the market place 1 a second type of agreement involves an extended collusion between partners creating common policies at the product level the usual justifications of this extension are the difficulties of protecting intellectual property the idea is then to allow partners who have achieved inventions together to also control together the processes and products which embody the results of their collaboration in order to recuperate jointly their r d investments 2 what could be expected from these types of agreement is a reduction in r d expenditures because of less wasteful duplication and a reduction of total production because of more reprinted from the american economic review 78 5 1133 1137 1988 center for operations research econometrics 1348 louvain la neuve belgium we are grateful to jean

semicollusion in the norwegian cement market abstract a model of semicollusion where firms collude on prices and compete on capacities is tailor made to the characteristics of the norwegian cement market and tested on this particular market for the period 1927 1982 the results indicate that the rapid increase in capacity and thereby in exports in the period 1956 1967 the late phase of the price cartel best can be explained by the market sharing agreement each firm overinvested in capacity to receive a large quota in the domestic market

increasing downside or outer risk the challenge of measuring competitive imbalance in closed and open leagues in two seminal articles menezes geiss and tressler 1980 and menezes and wang 2005 have defined the concepts of increases in downside and in outer risk such notions are useful to give intrinsic characterizations of the notions of prudence and temperance in this article we explore a new application about higher order risk preferences the measurement of competitive imbalance in sports leagues we show that desirable properties for the measurement of imbalance are the inclination to any increase in downside risk in the context of closed leagues and the aversion to any increase in outer risk in the context of open leagues

protection lobbying and market structure abstract we look at a model of lobbying by oligopolistic industry where firms allocate resources between lobbying and internal cost reducing activities we ask the following questions i if firms differ with respect to comparative advantage in lobbying what is the equilibrium allocation of resources between lobbying and cost reducing activities ii can lobbying opportunities reverse the profitability ranking among firms iii under what condition is the conventional wisdom that highly concentrated industries tend to obtain more protection valid the answers depend on various measures of comparative advantage in lobbying and on the demand curve

an empirical test of the effect of excess capacity in price setting capacity constrained supergames abstract in a multi period game industry excess capacity may act to deter firms from cheating on a non cooperative oligopoly price a model is developed that translates the deterrrent influence of excess capacity into predictions about the relationship between excess capacity and oligopoly price cost margins the model is tested with time series data from the u s aluminum industry results are consistent with those predicted by the model

the regionalism debate an overview the following sections are included introductiondefinitionswto provisions for ptashistorical evolutioneffects on union membersvinerian analysis welfare effects of a tariff preferencetransport costs and ptasrules of origin in ftasnon traditional gains guaranteed market access shelter from contingent protection locking in the reforms and dispute settlementimplications for the global trading systemcan pta expansion lead to global free trade do ptas make multilateral liberalization less likely do ptas lead to a rise in trade barriers against nonmembers the spaghetti bowl phenomenonwto illegal policies in ptasopen regionalism deep integrationconclusions minimizing the adverse effects of ptasreferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

long run competition in capacity short run competition in price and the cournot model in this article we investigate the nature of equilibrium in markets in which firms choose the scale of operation before they make pricing decisions we analyze a duopoly model in which firms choose their capacities before engaging in bertrand like price competition we demonstrate that the cournot outcome is unlikely to emerge in such markets and that the equilibrium tends to be more competitive than the cournot model would predict in addition our results indicate a tendency toward asymmetric firm sizes and price dispersion that results from the mixed strategies firms use in equilibrium

developing countries and the gains from regionalism links between trade and farm policy reforms in mexico we use a multi country computable general equilibrium cge model with agricultural policy details to simulate the effects of north american free trade agreement nafta we find that mexico gains from nafta only when it also removes domestic distortions in agriculture in that case agriculture can generate allocative efficiency gains large enough to offset the terms of trade losses that arise because mexico has higher initial tariffs than its nafta partners when an rta forces a developing country to reform its domestic distortions that are linked to trade restrictions it becomes a building block toward multilateralism

competitive advantage and collusive optima cost differences may often be important in real oligopolies if side payments are impossible the standard cartel objective total industry profits lacks plausibility when costs differ this essay considers plausible alternatives four different technologies for effecting collusion which are essentially identical when costs are equal define sets of possible profits axiomatic bargaining models are used to select unconstrained optima from among these possibilities simple functional forms are employed low cost firms with large shares in cournot equilibrium may have little to gain from collusion if collusion is effective low cost firms will have relatively low estimated conjectural variations

cartels profits and excess capacity a model of a collusive duopoly in which each firm has limited capacity is studied the negotiated output quotas depend on the bargaining power of the firms which derives from the damage the firms can do by cutting prices for fixed capacities the unit profit of the small firm is at least as large as that of the large firm and the relative position of the small firm is better when demand is low when the capacities can be chosen once and for all there is excess capacity in equilibrium so long as the cost of capacity is not too high copyright 1987 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

demand for sport this article reviews international literature on the demand for professional sport the first part presents a conceptual framework for understanding the sources and determinants of the demand for professional sporting contests the second part reviews empirical evidence on key determinants of attendance at sporting events and on other sources of demand such as broadcasting sponsorship and merchandising the review concludes that there is still much to be learned about demand for professional sport and that there are no simple lessons to be drawn from existing literature but important messages do emerge from studies of demand for attendance with regard to effects of uncertainty of outcome quality of contest and quality of viewing copyright 2003 oxford university press

how should commodities be taxed a supergame theoretic analysis abstract this paper studies the impact of commodity taxes on the sustainability of collusion in imperfectly competitive markets we consider both a cournot and a bertrand supergame with discounting with collusion being supported by either grim trigger strategies or stick and carrot optimal punishments we show that irrespective of firms choice variable and under both punishment schemes increased reliance on ad valorem taxation makes it easier for firms to sustain a collusive agreement contrary to the conventional wisdom according to which ad valorem taxation should be preferred on welfare grounds we find that welfare under specific taxation might be higher than welfare under ad valorem taxation the main conclusion of our analysis is that traditional welfare results on the comparison between ad valorem and specific taxation based on static models do not necessarily survive in a dynamic setting where the possibility of collusion among firms is taken into account in response to an increase in the ad valorem tax rate sufficiently patient firms might find it rational to form an implicit cartel which would not have existed otherwise

training and the time to find a job in israel using high frequency data for israel it is found that trainees exit unemployment at a much faster rate than comparable unemployed who did not receive training it is argued that this powerful training effect is unlikely to be simply the result of positive self selection of trainees the training effect is detected when using nonparametric estimation methods parametric methods fail to pick it up because of a very large exit spike in the hazard function which occurs when the training is completed other findings include the following the duration of unemployment varies directly with the duration of entitlement to unemployment benefit as well as the replacement ratio also the exit hazard from unemployment rises as the benefit entitlement period draws to a close

excess capacity and collusion in this paper the authors analyze a restricted class of equilibria in the dynamic model of j p benoit and v krishna 1987 in which firms choose their scale of operation before engaging in a repeated game of price competition benoit and krishna established that all firms carry excess capacity in all collusive equilibria as the authors are interested in the relationship between excess capacity and collusion in price they examine equilibria in which firms tacitly collude in price but not in investment decisions copyright 1990 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

informative advertising competition or cooperation there are two main views of advertising the informative view and the persuasive view this thesis studies aspects of the informative view one aspect of interest is whether firms can benefit from collusion on advertising even though advertising is only informative if so will this enhance or lower welfare there are several reasons why firms may want to collude on adver tising first the legal field is tilted in favour of nonprice collusion second it is not at all obvious that collusion on price is more profitable than collusion on advertising and third the analyses of grossman and shapiro 1984 and others show that profits can be increased by restricting advertising in paper 1 we examine firms incentives to collude on advertising and the implications for welfare we find that collusion on advertising and competition on price is more profitable than competition on both price and advertising we also find that semicollusion on advertising is detrimental to welfare this suggests a need for monitoring especially since it is in the interest of firms to restrict price advertising we also compare semicollusion on price to semicollusion on advertising we find that in general semicollusion on price does not lead to higher profits compared to semicollusion on advertising hence we lend theoretical support to the empirical literature that consistently find evidence of semicollusion on advertising rather than on price another important issue concerns the effect on prices and profits of ad vertising only a subset of the product range many firms in particular those in the retail sector sell a wide variety of products but only advertise a few recent empirical evidence suggests that prices of unadvertised products are higher milyo and waldfogel 1999 theoretically little is known in paper 2 we study the effects of advertising only a subset of products we allow for both low and high differentiation and at the same time we explicitly model the advertising decision we find that the extend of differentiation between competing firms plays an important role in the analysis of loss leader pricing when firms sell products with the same reservation price loss leader pric ing obtains only when differentiation is low when products are less similar however price competition is less intense and as a result firms advertise prices above marginal cost our loss leader pricing results enable us to shed some light on the seemingly paradoxical empirical findings in the marketing literature that loss leader pricing fails to increase store traffic loss leader sales and hence to increase profits we also consider a different subject price discrimination although it is well understood that movements in the exchange rate have a bearing on firm profitability and hence affect firm behaviour the role of exchange rate variability in the firm s choice of the number of varieties to produce has to my knowledge not been explored this despite the fact that the product mix is an important aspect of firm strategy by tinkering with the number of varieties a firm can bolster its ability to extract consumer surplus in paper 3 we explore this issue we show that variability in the exchange rate induces the firm to vertically segment markets i e offer two varieties in each market this happens because exchange rate variability affects income dispersion and hence the firm s incentives to extract consumer surplus to better extract surplus the firm offers two price quality menus high quality variant priced high for top end surplus extraction and a low quality variety priced low to address market coverage concerns

towards an evaluation of regional integration in latin america in the 1990s the decade of the 1990s has witnessed a wave of regional integration initiatives in latin america more than 14 agreements free trade areas or customs unions since 1990 with a handful more in varying degrees of negotiation see table 1 however this was not just a latin american phenomenon as regionalism has more than ever become a global trend mistry 1996 indeed now japan south korea and hong kong are the only world trade organization wto members which are not signatories to at least one preferential trade agreement wto 1995 regional integration is not new to latin america economic integration played an important role in the region s early post war economic history the 1960s and 1970s saw a number of very ambitious initiatives inspired by the successful western european experience ffrench davis munoz and palma 1994 indeed at its peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s the topic of integration was hard to avoid in the discussion of latin american development however disillusionment with integration processes had clearly set in by the late 1970s and the discussion of regional integration was all but silenced by the external crisis of the early 1980s this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the failure of training in britain analysis and prescription in the last decade education and training et reform has become a major issue in many of the world s industrial powers one theme which runs throughout these reform initiatives is the need to adapt et systems to the changing economic environment these changes include the increasing integration of world markets the shift in mass manufacturing towards newly developed nations and the rapid development of new technologies most notably information technologies education and training are seen to play a crucial role in restoring or maintaining international competitiveness both on the macro level by easing the transition of the workforce into new industries and at the micro level where firms producing high quality specialized goods and services require a well qualified workforce capable of rapid adjustment in the work process and continual product innovation this paper will highlight the need for policy makers and academics to take account of the two way nature of the relationship between et and the economy

profit maximizing gate revenue sharing in sports leagues i introduction the professional team sports industry is one of the scarce industries in which coordination between competing firms clubs is widely accepted clubs in almost all sports have organized themselves in legal cartels leagues it seems obvious that a certain degree of coordination is needed to produce a team sports competition for example for scheduling games however leagues have introduced regulations which clearly go beyond the purely practical issues involved in producing games the most relevant examples include gate revenue sharing the home team gives a part of its match day income to the visiting team collective sales of media rights the league monopolizes media rights and distributes the revenues and salary caps the league limits the amount teams may spend on player wages these regulations would probably be classified as restrictive practices in any other industry yet the fact that sports leagues openly communicate their application provides an opportunity to examine how these cartels have used their devices to coordinate behavior and increase joint profits table 1 gives an overview of gate revenue sharing arrangements in sports leagues around the world almost all american major leagues engage in gate revenue sharing the national football league nfl major league baseball mlb and major league soccer mls share revenues through a central pool each club contributes a fixed percentage of its gate revenues to this pool which is distributed equally among all clubs the national hockey league nhl has a more complicated arrangement where only teams that have revenues below the median and small media markets are eligible to receive support from revenue sharing introducing local revenue sharing was also reported to be one of the issues on the table during the recent lockout in the national basketball association nba 1 to the best of my knowledge however the details of the new nba revenue sharing rule have not been made public yet in contrast european soccer clubs along with the australian football league afl share almost no gate revenues both the bundesliga and the english premier league epl have arrangements to share revenues from cup games yet these constitute a minor portion of the teams schedules interestingly both the epl and the afl had sizeable sharing arrangements in the past but contrary to the u s leagues chose to abolish these these observations raise the question why some league cartels share gate revenues while others have chosen not to i examine this question using a theoretical model of a sports league with profit maximizing teams a crucial innovation in my model is that teams serve two types of consumers in each team s local market fans are committed and prefer to see their team win in the nationwide market consumers are neutral tv viewers who like to watch a tense and high level competition a team s local or stadium revenue increases in its on field performance whereas media revenue depends on the competitive balance and overall quality of play for the league as a whole my results first show that local or gate revenue sharing decreases talent investments 2 initially lower talent investments boost club profits because total costs go down too little investment however reduces revenues which harms profits at high levels of sharing to find a profit maximizing sharing rule the league has to balance these two effects the dampening effect of sharing on investments is weaker in leagues whose teams have homogeneous local markets consequently homogeneous leagues maximize profits by setting a more extensive gate revenue sharing rule than leagues with less equal teams this may explain the observation from table 1 that the more unequal european soccer leagues share less local revenues than the more homogeneous u s major leagues 3 a somewhat striking implication of this result is also that gate revenue sharing is more interesting for clubs who have more equal revenue potentials

the theory of preferential trade agreements historical evolution and current trends the theory of preferential trade agreements pta s or what might be described in policy terms as the general agreement on tariffs and trade gatt article xxiv sanctioned freetrade areas fta s and customs unions cu s has undergone two phases of evolution in two very different modes largely reflecting the contrasting policy concerns of the time in this paper we trace this evolution offering both a historical context and an intellectual coherence to diverse analytical approaches

on the workings of a cartel evidence from the norwegian cement industry using the institutional set up of the norwegian cement industry in particular its sharing rule we are able to identify the workings of a cartel in some detail given data on prices production and exports we are able to identify marginal costs as well as the effectiveness of the cartel we compare our marginal cost estimates which are derived from an equilibrium condition to detailed cost accounting data and find that our estimate of marginal cost is very much in line with the data we then show that the cement cartel has been ineffective in the sense that the sharing rule induces overproduction and exporting below marginal costs in this sense it is consumers not firms that benefi tf rom the sharing rule we find that the ineffectiveness of the cartel is becoming so large that domestic welfare of a merger to monopoly would in fact be positive at around 1968 which is exactly when the merger actually took place however we also show that competition would have resulted in even higher welfare gains over the entire sample

an analysis of cooperative research and development i analyze the effects of cooperative research whereby member firms agree to share the costs andfruits of a research project before they undertake it in this model industrywide agreements tend to have socially beneficial effects when the degree ofproduct market competition is low when there are r d spillovers in the absence of cooperation when a high degree of sharing is technologically feasible and when the agreement concerns basic research rather than development activities i show that a royalty free cross licensing agreement among any number offirms lowers the equilibrium level of innovation even though it increases the efficiency of r d through sharing

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

the impact of trade union membership on training in britain in order to measure the union non union training differential in britain a recursive model of training participation and union membership is estimated using data taken from the 1989 labour force survey the results show a positive and significant effect of union membership on training participation in small establishments this is consistent with the hypothesis that any negative impact on employer provided training that might have arisen from the union wage mark up is outweighed by a positive influence exerted by unions through the exercise of collective voice and or reductions in labour turnover by contrast in establishments with 25 or more workers unions have no significant impact on training

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

income inequality competitive balance and the attractiveness of team sports some evidence and a natural experiment from english soccer this chapter examines the relationship between financial inequality competitive balance and attendance at english professional league soccer it shows that while financial inequality among the clubs has increased competitive balance has remained relatively stable and match attendance appears unrelated to competitive balance a clearer test of the relationship is suggested by comparison with fa cup matches because income inequality is primarily driven by inter rather than intradivisional inequality the fa cup has been a much more unbalanced competition than the divisional championships attendance at fa cup matches relative to the corresponding league matches has fallen over the last 20 years

the economic design of sporting contests what is the optimal number of entrants in a race or the optimal number of teams in a baseball league what is the optimal structure of prizes for a golf tournament or degree of revenue sharing for a football championship how evenly balanced should the competing teams be in the nascar or formula one championships what is the maximum number of entrants per nation to the olympic games that should be permitted what quota of qualifying teams to the soccer world cup should be allocated to the developing nations

the free trade area of the americas good for latin america the following sections are included introductionmercantilist bias in the effects of discriminatory liberalizationpreferential tariff liberalization the basic casebeyond the basic caseftas under quotasnon traditional gains from north south integrationnaftastatic welfare gainsnon traditional gainsmarket accessshelter from new protectionism in the united statescredibility to and lock on the reformsa digression to the european unionthe free trade area of the americasregionalism and harmonizationa summary of conclusionsreferences this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

the combined effect of salary restrictions and revenue sharing in sports leagues i introduction invariance principles are the golden eggs of economics franco modigliani merton miller and ronald coase were awarded nobel prizes for their formulations of important invariance principles a predecessor of the famous coase theorem is rottenberg s invariance proposition according to rottenberg 1956 the distribution of playing talent between clubs in professional sports leagues does not depend on the allocation of property rights to players services el hodiri and quirk 1971 fort and quirk 1995 and vrooman 1995 extend this invariance proposition to gate revenue sharing based on their models they claim that revenue sharing does not change the level of competitive balance within a league this form of invariance proposition has become one of the most heavily disputed issues in sports economics because its centerpieces revenue sharing and the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis represent two of the most important idiosyncrasies in the professional team sports industry according to the uncertainty of outcome hypothesis fans prefer to attend games with uncertain outcomes and enjoy close championship races unlike toyota which benefits from weak competitors in the automobile industry real madrid and the new york yankees need strong competitors to maximize their revenues in sports a weak team produces a negative externality on its stronger competitors revenue sharing arrangements have been introduced as a measure to improve the competitive balance by partially internalizing this externality if the invariance proposition held revenue sharing would be worthless current revenue sharing schemes vary widely among professional sports leagues all over the world in north america the most prominent is possibly that operated by the national football league nfl where the visiting club secures 40 of the locally earned television and gate receipt revenue in 1876 major league baseball mlb introduced a 50 50 split of gate receipts that was reduced over time since 2003 all the clubs in the american league have put 34 of their locally generated revenue gate concession television etc into a central pool which is then divided equally among all the clubs the national basketball association nba and the national hockey league nhl also operate with a pool sharing arrangement moreover in the australian football league afl gate receipts were at one time split evenly between the home and the visiting team this 50 50 split was finally abolished in 2000 other measures to increase competitive balance are salary caps and floors a salary cap floor puts an upper lower bound on a club s payroll since most leagues compute their salary caps and floors on the basis of the revenues of the preceding season caps and floors can be treated as fixed limits the nba was the first league to introduce a salary cap for the 1984 1985 season for the 2008 2009 season the soft salary cap is fixed at us 58 7 million today salary caps are in effect in professional team sports leagues all over the world in the nhl for example each team had to spend between us 34 3 million and 50 3 million on player salaries in the 2007 2008 season in the nfl the salary cap in 2009 is approximately us 128 million per team whereas the salary floor was 87 6 of the salary cap which is equivalent to us 112 1 million the afl also operates with a combined salary cap and floor for 2009 the salary cap was fixed at a 7 69 million the floor at 7 12 million another australian league the national rugby league nrl has implemented a salary cap and floor system which forced each team to spend between a 3 96 million and 4 4 million in 2009 in europe salary caps are in effect in the guiness premiership in rugby union and the super league in rugby league 1 in most industries payroll caps would be regarded as an exploitation of market power and would be prohibited by anti trust authorities

markets cartel behavior and amateurism in college sports this paper studies intercollegiate athletics in the context of the theory of cartels some point to the explicit attempts by the national collegiate athletic association ncaa to restrict output and payments for factors of production as evidence of cartel behavior others argue that such limits enhance product quality by preserving amateurism i find that the ncaa s compensation limits on athletes lead to high levels of rents from the entertainment revenues produced by the athletes a finding consistent with the cartel interpretation the athletes producing these rents are disproportionately african american while the beneficiaries are primarily white the rents are typically spent on facilities nonrevenue sports and possibly head coaches salaries big time football and men s basketball programs earn accounting profits although the athletic departments in which they reside make accounting losses on average however there is some evidence albeit not unanimous that sports generate alumni contributions state appropriations and additional student applications but arms race considerations suggest that there may be some societal gains to the aggregate limitation of spending on college athletics

consumer benefited cartels under strategic capital investment competition abstract the purpose of this paper is to refute the genrally accepted idea that a cartel raises producers surplus at the expense of consumers surplus if firms in an industry expect that a cartel in which the output is allocated on the bases of the capital equipment will be formed then each firm tries to make a larger capital investment than before which may lead to larger consumers surplus through this argument i shall present one of the reasons why heavy industries had excess capacity in postwar japan

advantageous semi collusion the textbook view that cartels increase industry profits and lower consumer welfare ignores the effects of competition in other activities a revisionist view shows that when cartel members compete in other activities i e when they semi collude the cartel members may be worse off and consumers better off using a two stage model in which the non production activity is r d and is subject to technological spillovers we show that both the traditional and revisionist views can be wrong that consumers and producers can both be made worse off or both better off by a semi collusive production cartel

capital investments and price agreements in semicollusive markets we consider a semicollusive market where firms compete in a long run variable such as investment in capital or capacity and collude with respect to a short run variable such as price or market shares our concern is with the potential destabilizing effect of the long run competition on the short run collusion we show that under a certain refinement of the equilibrium the set of equilibria is reduced to include just the one in which the collusive agreement is stable we then lend some support to the phenomenon of an inverse association between advertising and competition by investigating the conditions under which overcapitalization occurs in the above equilibrium

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

competition within a cartel league conduct and team conduct in the market for baseball player services a model of major league baseball is developed which distinguishes between league behavior and individual team behavior the league is viewed as setting rules that restrict the team s willingness to pay and or impose costs on the transfer of players between teams given these rules teams then compete for player services the model is estimated and tested the evidence suggests that the restrictive effect of league rules on player salaries declined between 1986 1988 and 1989 1991 consistent with anecdotal evidence within the rules established by the league however teams appear to behave as competitive price takers through the entire sample period

industrial targeting in free trade areas with policy independence we investigate the limits of a mechanism for free trade area fta formation that simultaneously satisfies internal industrialization targets for arbitrary targets we find necessary and sufficient conditions that guarantee that the mechanism is efficient for member countries individually even if other members do not implement the efficient policy when the objective is conservative designed to protect the level of industrialization previously achieved by the target industry member countries are guaranteed gains from the efficient policy and their fta participation the analysis covers cases with transportation costs and explains why minimally restrictive rules of origin support efficiency and policy independence on etudie les limites d un mecanisme de formation d une zone de libre echange zle qui simultanement rencontre certains objectifs internes d industrialisation pour des cibles arbitraires on definit les conditions necessaires et suffisantes qui garantissent que le mecanisme est efficient pour les pays membres individuellement meme si d autres membres ne mettent pas en place la politique efficiente quand les objectifs sont conservateurs tentant seulement de proteger le niveau d industrialisation auquel on s est donne acces anterieurement dans l industrie ciblee on peut garantir des gains pour les pays membres decoulant de la politique efficiente et de la participation a la zle l analyse examine aussi des situations avec couts de transport positifs et explique pourquoi des restrictions minimales sur l origine des produits assurent l efficacite et l independance des politiques

partial collusion fosters minimum product differentiation we investigate a spatial duopoly in which the firms simultaneously select locations at the beginning of time once chosen the locations are fixed forever but the firms will choose prices in each of a countably infinite succession of time periods we are interested in equilibrium behavior when the firms will collusively arrange a trigger strategy equilibrium in prices and will select their locations knowing that a particular such trigger strategy price equilibrium will ensue specifically we restrict our attention to prices that support an outcome on the profit possibility frontier at which the ratio of firm 1 s profits to those of firm 2 is positively related to the similar ratio of profits at the single shot noncooperative equilibrium for these profit sharing rules the resulting location equilibrium is unique and involves the pairing of firms at the market center

the value of collusion with endogenous capacity and demand uncertainty collusion has often been alleged in industries where long lived capacity investments are important this article develops a computational duopoly model with capacity investments demand shocks and either competitive or collusive pricing it shows that allowing for endogenous capacity investments can sometimes make collusion less valuable than competition and that it can change the normal relationships between the profitability of collusion and both the discount rate and industry wide demand shocks

unemployment and the demand for retraining an econometric analysis this paper describes and estimates a human capital model of whether unemployed workers seek retraining and the timing of an application in an unemployment spell the authors find that the probability of seeking retraining declines with age after twenty seven years with being attached to noncontracting industries with greater contentment in unemployment compared with last job and with union membership applications are increased by formal qualifications cse o a level and decreased by vocational training relative to no qualifications almost half the unemployed had sought retraining and this was largely complete after nine months below the mean interrupted unemployment duration copyright 1991 by royal economic society

partners to a preferential trade agreement implications of varying size abstract most often the theory of preferential trade agreements assumes a small home country and a large partner in this paper the welfare implications of a small trading partner are examined a distinction is found between two ranges of size a country may be just small or be ultra small conventional propositions about the likelihood of a gain or a loss from entering into a preferential agreement would still hold when the partner is small whereas some of them would have to be reversed when the partner is an ultra small economy

winning games versus winning championships the economics of fan interest and team performance championship prospects as distinct from game winning prospects may contribute to a fan s interest in a particular sports team if so then both season length and the structure of championship playoffs help determine the equilibrium allocation of playing skills across the teams of a league evidence from a regression analysis of team attendance in baseball indicates that ticket demand depends in part on perceived flag winning prospects several patterns in the winning percentages of league leaders in the major u s team sports are consistent with the perspective that championship considerations influence the allocation of playing skills

location and survival in the national hockey league a model of professional sport franchises is introduced and used to explore the locational and other determi nants of profitability particular attention is paid to the effect of location on attendance market power and long run team quality whe n estimated using data for the national hockey league in 1977 78 the model indicates that location has an effect on each of these and tha t their combined effect on profitability is effective in explaining p rior and subsequent decisions concerning league expansion and franchi se relocation a number of other matters are also addressed includin g league arguments for antitrust exemption and league policies to res trict expansion copyright 1988 by blackwell publishing ltd

the welfare effects of rent saving and rent seeking this paper uses an overlapping generations framework to model the allocation of import licences of intermediate goods according to firm capacity it shows that this method of allocation encourages rent seeking and also thereby improves welfare compared with a method that does not allow rent seeking a o kreuger 1975 1974 and j n bhagwati and p desai 1970 describe how turkey and india have allocated imports on the basis of firm capacity which led to rent seeking through overexpansion of capacity j n bhagwati and t n srinivasan 1980 first recognized the possibility that rent seeking may actually improve welfare in the presence of a distortion as it does in this paper

an estimate of the rent generated by a premium college football player the national collegiate athletic association limits the payments athletes can receive for their services colleges are effectively monosony employers so players will not be paid their marginal revenue product therefore colleges capture an economic rent from players this paper measures these rents by estimating the marginal revenue product of a top college football player the empirical results suggest that a premium college player generates over 500 000 in annual revenues for his team

what is the cause of growth in regional trade trade liberalisation or rtas the case of agriculture this paper delves into the debate on the proliferation of regional trade arrangements by focusing on bilateral agricultural trade data over the 1962 1995 period for countries that currently are members of nafta mercosur the eu and apec agricultural is chosen because it has historically been protected by developed and dis protected by developing nations while in the case of the eu its common agricultural policy was the major policy jointly managed and funded by member countries we suggest that the literature has tended to focus on factors explaining the level of trade and neglected factors affecting growth in trade while neighborhood characteristics affect neighborhood trade they also appear to affect the policy regimes of neighboring countries the shift to more outward oriented regimes is thus likely to induce a dynamic in trade among neighboring countries requiring several years to stabilize as neighborhood trade grows it is natural to form trade arrangements so as to harmonize policies and to remove other barriers if this is the case then we should expect the growth in intra regional trade to exceed growth in extra regional trade and these patterns should occur before the formation of regional trade arrangements our results support this explanation this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

tacit collusion and international commodity taxation the paper employs a model of dynamic price competition to study how international commodity taxation affects the stability of collusive agreements when producers in an international duopoly agree not to export into each other s home market we consider both the choice of international tax principle and the harmonization of tax rates and differentiate between a setting where production costs differ between countries and a setting where exogenous tax rate differentials are the only asymmetry the conclusions derived from this model differ strongly from those obtained under the assumption of competitive product markets

competitive balance versus competitive intensity before a match is one of these two concepts more relevant in explaining attendance the case of the french football ligue 1 over the period 2008 2011 the aim of this article is to investigate the determinants of attendance at french football ligue 1 matches over the period 2008 2011 with an emphasis on examining the effects of both competitive balance and intensity before a match competitive balance is measured by the point difference between the two teams concerned by a match in the championship competitive intensity is measured by the point difference for the home team in relation to ranks with sporting stakes results show that competitive balance has an insignificant impact whereas competitive intensity has a significantly positive impact implications are drawn

financial fair play in european football in 2010 uefa the governing body of european football announced a set of financial restraints which clubs must observe when seeking to enter its competitions notably the uefa champions league we analyse the financial and sporting impact of these financial fair play ffp regulations in four major european football leagues we first discuss the details of ffp and frame these regulations in the institutional set up of the european football industry we then show how the break even constraint embedded in ffp could substantially reduce average payrolls and wage to turnover ratios while strengthening the position of the traditional top teams since the benefits of the break even rule to consumers remain unclear we argue that these rent shifting regulations might fall foul of european competition law thomas peeters and stefan szymanski