a mixed oligopoly in the presence of foreign private firms in this paper a mixed oligopoly model is considered in which a state owned public firm competes with both domestic and foreign private firms previous articles on mixed oligopoly did not include foreign private firms the effect on the equilibrium involves a lower price and a different allocation of production relative to the case when all private firms are domestically owned in addition issues such as the effects of an open door policy allowing foreign firms to enter and the effects of foreign acquisition of domestic firms are discussed

trade policy and mixed enterprises this paper demonstrates that the degree of state ownership affects neither the level of socially optimal activities nor welfare if the government chooses optimal trade policy instruments in the case of rivalry in the home market the optimal import tariff is independent of the degree of state ownership and the optimal production subsidy decreases with state ownership if the optimal tariff is positive for the case of cournot rivalry in a third market the optimal export subsidy increases with state ownership while in the case of bertrand rivalry with differentiated products the optimal export tax increases

estimation and decomposition of technical efficiency for sugarbeet farms this study computes technical efficiency for idaho sugarbeet farms and decomposes it into pure technical efficiency scale efficiency and congestion efficiency using nonparametric procedures the results indicate that the average efficiency is 0 88 with 45 of the farms in the sample exhibiting full efficiency improper scale operation and input overutilization are the major sources of inefficiency for remaining farms technical efficiency is independent of farm size a tobit model was used to examine the impacts of variables such as farm size specialization tenancy position hired labour location and managerial ability on efficiency inefficiency in sugarbeet production results in a shortfall of potential revenues not only for producers but also for landlords and processors

consumer information and competition between nonprofit and for profit nursing homes this paper develops implications of arrow s hypothesis that nonprofit organizations are prevalent in health care because of quality uncertainty the model analyzes the ability of nonprofits to mitigate market failures created by asymmetric information in an environment characterized by potential competition from both explicitly for profit firms and for profits in disguise profit motivated firms who obtain nonprofit status in order to exploit the perceived trustworthiness of the nonprofit sector under certain conditions it is shown that nonprofit status can serve as a credible signal of quality and that nonprofits can decrease the underprovision of quality both by providing high quality services and indirectly via a spillover effect on quality in the for profit sector applicability to long term care and implications for empirical research and policy towards nonprofits in health care are discussed

mixed oligopoly privatization subsidization and the order of firms moves several types of objectives abstract we show the robustness of results in earlier works for a subsidy in mixed oligopoly these results do not depend upon the fact that each private firm maximizes its own profits

endogenous timing in duopoly games stackelberg or cournot equilibria abstract simultaneous versus sequential play is studied in an extended game in a preplay stage players decide whether to select actions in the basic game at the first opportunity or to wait until observing their rivals first period actions in one extended game players first decide when to select actions without committing to actions in the basic game the equilibrium has a simultaneous play subgame unless payoffs in a sequential play subgame pareto dominate those payoffs in another extended game deciding to select at the first turn requires committing to an action both sequential play outcomes are the equilibria only in undominated strategies

determining factors for the adoption of e business the case of smes in korea this study investigates the determining factors of the successful adoption of e business by small and medium enterprises smes in korea using survey data after the major determining factors were identified from the innovation adoption literature and were extracted by applying the principal component analysis to the survey data and by adding the country specific characteristics of korea we conducted empirical analyses to determine the critical success factors for the adoption of e business by korean firms the empirical results which are based on t tests of the differences between adopters and non adopters the linear probability model and the logit model all suggest that the important determinants of the successful adoption of e business by smes in korea are the ceo s knowledge of information technology it e business relative advantages and benefits from implementing e business governmental support globalization strategy and the north korean factor business size the cost of e business adoptio

consumer decision making e commerce and perceived risks this article studies how adoption and usage behaviour of the internet and online shopping respectively influence the preference to use electronic commerce to purchase different types of products we empirically model the preference for electronic commerce when consumers have to buy different types of products and thus face different types of risks cox and rich 1964 unlike previous research we find that consumers who have previously shopped online display stronger preferences to buy products on the internet irrespective of the perceived level of product specific risks of online shopping this article provides an interesting and novel insight into how both adoption and usage of electronic commerce impact on the attitude and risk perception of buying less predictable more risky products on the internet

working in public and private firms abstract we develop a theoretical framework for comparing incentives labor productivity and the allocation of effort in public versus private enterprises we incorporate socializing an activity which yields utility for workers and affects a firm s output into a multitask model of work organization we establish the two following results first the optimal workers compensation policy displays a larger incentive intensity in the private firm than in the public firm second labor productivity in the private firm may be higher or lower than in the public firm both results fit well with the findings of empirical work

economic efficiency in farm households trends explanatory factors and estimation methods factors explaining differences in economic efficiency between farms are of major interest to owners managers and other stakeholders as they strive to improve earnings and improve the chances of firm survival this study is undertaken to improve our understanding of interfarm differences in and opportunities to improve farm household efficiency in utilizing their land labor and capital resources to achieve household objectives the technical allocative and scale efficiencies of farm households are estimated using a nonparametric output based data envelopment analysis dea of a panel data set from 1993 to 2006 single and double bootstrapping procedures are used to estimate technical efficiency initial technical efficiency assuming variable returns to scale tev is estimated to be 0 83 using single bootstrapping the average bias corrected tev estimate is 0 70 using double bootstrapping the tev estimate is 0 72 allocative efficiency is estimated to be 0 81 scale efficiency is estimated to be 0 93 the only factor that is consistently associated with higher technical efficiency across analysis methods and years is larger farm size as measured by the log of farm income the significance of other factors changes with analysis methods

mixed duopoly privatization and subsidization with excess burden of taxation we investigate optimal tax subsidy policies in mixed and private oligopolies with excess burden of taxation we compare the optimal subsidies and the resulting welfare levels among four regimes mixed and private cournot duopolies and stackelberg competition with public and private leaderships we show that in contrast to the existing works on the privatization neutrality theorem privatization affects resulting welfare duopole mixte privatisation et subsidisation en presence de fardeau fiscal excedentaire on examine les politiques optimales de taxes et de subventions dans le cas d oligopoles mixtes et prives en presence de fardeau fiscal excedentaire on compare les subsides optimaux et les effets sur le niveau de bien etre dans quatre regimes les duopoles de cournot mixte et prive et la concurrence a la stackelberg avec leadership public et prive on montre que contrairement a ce que suggeraient les travaux anterieurs sur le theoreme de la neutralite de la privatisation la privatisation affecte les niveaux de bien etre

an application of the dea double bootstrap to examine sources of efficiency in bangladesh rice farming in this article we examine sources of technical efficiency for rice farming in bangladesh the motivation for the analysis is the need to close the rice yield gap to enable food security we employ the dea double bootstrap of simar and wilson 2007 to estimate and explain technical efficiency this technique overcomes severe limitations inherent in using the two stage dea approach commonly employed in the efficiency literature from a policy perspective our results show that potential efficiency gains to reduce the yield gap are greater than previously found statistically positive influences on technical efficiency are education extension and credit with age being a negative influence

in a world without borders the impact of taxes on internet commerce the rapid rise in sales over the internet and the fact that most internet buyers pay no sales tax has ignited a considerable debate over taxes and the internet this paper uses new data on the purchase decisions of approximately 25 000 online users to examine the effect of local sales taxes on internet commerce the results suggest that controlling for observable characteristics people living in high sales taxes locations are significantly more likely to buy online the results are quite robust and cannot be explained by unobserved technological sophistication shopping costs or other alternative explanations the magnitudes in the paper suggest that applying existing sales taxes to internet commerce might reduce the number of online buyers by up to 24 percent

public private mixed delivery and information effects this paper analyses public private mixed delivery of essential public services under price regulation a private firm may have lower production costs and can potentially provide a performance benchmark for a public firm a public firm may offer higher quality service and can reveal the production cost of the private firm to the regulator however this paper shows that public private mixed delivery does not always dominate public delivery or private delivery mixed delivery is optimal only when i the cost uncertainty of the private firm is large ii the managerial incentive problem of the public firm is large and iii the performances of the public and private firms are highly correlated

endogenous role in mixed markets a two production period model in this paper i investigate endogenous roles in a mixed duopoly where private and state owned public firms compete by allowing two production periods i find that many equilibria exist including the cournot type equilibrium and one stackelberg type equilibrium where the public firm becomes the follower however another stackelberg type equilibrium where the public firm becomes the leader does not exist if small inventory costs are introduced the unique equilibrium outcome becomes the stackelberg type where the public firm is the follower

asymmetric information ownership and quality of care an empirical analysis of nursing homes theoretically when asymmetric information exists nonprofit organizations due to the attenuation of the property right provide better quality of service than do the for profits despite extensive theoretical examination of the behavior of nonprofits there has been very little empirical testing of the plausibility of these theories this article addresses the effect of ownership type on the quality of service in the nursing home industry an environment particularly conducive to identifying the existence of asymmetric information the study shows that the differences between for profit and nonprofit homes do become manifest when asymmetric information is present

economic perspectives on privatization despite being one of the most fundamental issues in political economy the question of the appropriate boundary between public and private enterprise received relatively little attention in mainstream economic analysis until quite recently in the 1980s however programs of ownership reform were started in many developed and developing countries dramatic though some of these policies have been they are likely to be overshadowed in the 1990s by even greater privatization in the reforming socialist economies the opening sections of this paper are organized around three broad and interrelated questions how does ownership matter for the efficiency of enterprise performance what is the role for privatization in financing public debts and deficits what are the distributional and political implications of privatization finally we examine privatization in practice in three countries britain chile and poland

market deregulation trade liberalization and productive efficiency in bangladesh agriculture an empirical analysis the impact of trade liberalization and of market deregulation in general on the performance of agriculture remains contentious and empirical issue in the literature following the random coefficient frontier modelling framework this paper attempts to contribute to this debate by computing the farm specific productive efficiency indices in bangladesh agriculture before and after reform it also examines the impact of some farm specific and policy variables on productive efficiency the empirical results show that there are wide variations in productive efficiency across farms and regions and the average efficiency of all regions increased modestly by 8 percentage points from the pre reform to post reform period the efficiency differentials are largely explained by farm size infrastructure households off farm income and the reduction of government anti agricultural bias in relation to trade and domestic policies the implication of these results suggests the need for further policy reform to augment p

using cost observation to regulate firms the paper emphasizes the use of accounting data in regulatory or procurement contracts when the supplier 1 has superior information about the cost of the project and 2 invests in cost reduction the main result states that under risk neutrality the supplier announces an expected cost and is given an incentive contract linear in cost overruns this optimal contract moves toward a fixed price contract as the announced cost decreases an investment choice is then introduced and the use of a rate of return regulation is studied

a generalized production frontier approach for estimating determinants of inefficiency in u s dairy farms this article investigates farm level efficiency of u s dairy farmers by estimating their technical and allocative efficiency technical inefficiency is assumed to be composed of a deterministic component that is a function of some farm specific characteristics and a random component by doing this we extend the stochastic frontier methodology in which determinants of technicial inefficiency are explicitly introduced in the model given the inputs variations in efficiency of farms are then explained by both deterministic and random components of technical inefficiency the empirical results indicate that a levels of education of the farmer are important factors determining technical inefficiency and b large farms are more efficient technically than small and medium sized farms both technical and allocative inefficiency are found to decrease with increase in the level of education of the farmer

partial privatization in mixed duopoly abstract we investigate a quantity setting duopoly involving a private firm and a privatized firm jointly owned by the public and private sectors the private firm maximizes profits while the privatized firm takes both profits and social welfare into consideration we consider how many shares the government should hold in the privatized firm we find that neither full privatization the government does not hold any shares nor full nationalization the government holds all of the shares is optimal under moderate conditions

the subsidiarity bias in regulation abstract we study the choice of the regulatory structure when a firm engages in different activities for different countries under decentralization regulatory contracts suffer from two opposite distortions the competition between regulatory authorities leads to too high powered contracts however with a dispersed ownership structure contracts tend to be too low powered for sufficiently substitutable activities decentralization always leads to an inefficient drift towards fixed price contracts nonetheless when regulators have private agendas and possess the discretion to distort their policy to gain the support of some interest groups decentralization may be preferred to centralization as competition between regulatory authorities mitigates their discretionary power

measuring and explaining scale efficiency with the parametric approach the case of greek tobacco growers estimates of technical and scale inefficiencies of tobacco farms in greece during the period 1991 1995 are obtained by using the parametric approach the degree of technical efficiency was found to be lower than the degree of scale efficiency and thus a greater portion of overall inefficiency is due to producing below the production frontier than to producing at an inefficient scale in addition the vast majority of farms in the sample exhibited suboptimal scale implying that output should be expanded to reach the optimal scale empirical results are provided to determine the impact of various socioeconomic demographic and geoclimatic indicators on technical and scale efficiency

game theoretic models of mixed oligopoly abstract in this paper we review various models that have been proposed for the study of mixed oligopoly that is markets in which private and public firm compete on equal basis using only market instruments

frontier production functions and technical efficiency a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics abstract the modelling and estimation of frontier production functions has been an important area of econometric research during the last two decades forsund lovell and schmidt 1980 and schmidt 1986 present reviews of the concepts and models involved and cite some of the empirical applications which had appeared to their respective times of publication this paper seeks to update the econometric modelling of frontier production functions associated with the estimation of technical efficiency of individual firms a survey of empirical applications in agricultural economics is an important part of the paper

mixed oligopoly privatization and strategic trade policy this paper investigates the effects of privatization in the presence of strategic trade policies within an international mixed oligopoly serving a single market if the government uses a domestic production subsidy then welfare is always increased with privatization while the optimal subsidy falls if the government uses an import tariff privatization increases welfare over much of the parameter space the optimal tariff however may rise or fall in recent years many countries around the world are privatizing their state owned industries at the same time many of these countries are also showing remarkable changes in their economic policies toward international trade on many occasions tariffs are significantly altered and domestic production subsidies are substantially reduced for example russia has privatized its aircraft industry and doubled its tariff on imported aircraft colombia has privatized its stateowned automobile maker colombia automotriz and reduced the import tariffs on foreign made cars in argentina the government is pursuing a policy of selective privatization and subsequent reduction of subsidies in western europe countries such as germany and spain have privatized their major airlines lufthansa and iberia respectively and significantly reduced subsidies what is the connection between privatization and strategic trade policies does privatization require a welfare maximizing government to alter trade barriers the objective of this paper is to answer these questions by investigating the interaction between privatization and strategic trade policies the effects of privatization are typically analyzed in the context of mixed oligopoly models where state owned welfare maximizing public firms interact with profit maximizing private firms 1 we investigate the interaction between privatization and strategic trade policies by incorporating strategic trade instruments in an international mixed oligopoly model specifically we consider two strategic trade instruments an import tariff and a domestic production subsidy the government chooses the optimal level of tariff or subsidy to maximize domestic welfare for each trade instrument we primarily focus on two questions first does privatization increase

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

impacts of trade liberalizations under the uruguay round on the world sugar market the impacts of the uruguay round policy provisions on the world sugar market show that these policies will stabilize the world sugar price at slightly higher levels than in the baseline global sugar consumption will increase as a result of the income growth caused by the uruguay round economic resources will be allocated more efficiently among the sugar industries of the various countries however the impacts on the sugar industries in countries with strong producer supports will be rather small because the negotiation process of the uruguay round has accommodated the changes in sugar policies already implemented by individual countries in the past few years low cost sugar producing countries will benefit from the higher world sugar price and consumers in countries with protected markets will benefit from lower domestic prices

measuring technical efficiency and productivity growth a comparison of sfa and dea on norwegian grain production data this article compares data envelopment analysis and stochastic frontier analysis to assess efficiency and productivity growth of norwegian grain producers previous studies have dealt with either one of them and less of both for the assessment of productivity growth or regress malmquist productivity indices are derived from both approaches the data cover a 10 year period we find consistency between the approaches to the extent that 1 there are potentials for efficiency improvements but the magnitudes depends on the model applied and by segmentation of the data set 2 there has been a productivity improvement in the sector on average in the interval 30 38 in the period studied and 3 technical change has had the greatest impact on productivity indicating that producers have a tendency to catch up with the front runners in general policy makers are warned not to be indifferent with respect to the approach used for efficiency and productivity measurement as these may give different results

r d competition between public and private sectors abstract we investigate a mixed market where a welfare maximizing public research institute competes against profit maximizing private firms we investigate r d competition by using a standard model of patent races where each firm chooses both its innovation size and r d expenditure we find that the innovation size r d expenditure chosen by the public institute is too small too large from the viewpoint of social welfare respectively and so the government should control the public institute appropriately we also discuss the welfare implications of privatization of public research institutes

should civil servants be restricted in wage bargaining a mixed duopoly approach abstract should civil servants employees in the public sector be allowed to bargain collectively to answer this question we construct a model of unionized mixed duopoly and examine the regulatory framework of public institutions especially focusing on a wage regulation imposed on the public firm the wage regulation turns out to yield critical welfare implications as it gives rise to two opposing strategic effects the wage regulation intensifies downstream market competition while it loosens upstream market competition the overall welfare effect is ambiguous depending crucially on the degree of product differentiation between the firms we also show that in contrast to the popular belief granting the right to bargain collectively to civil servants would not necessarily help them because they tend to demand excessively high wages when they are allowed to bargain collectively finally we briefly discuss a new perspective on the role of profit motives in public institutions when the wages are determined endogenously

e commerce and consumer s purchasing behaviour after its first exposure to the public in 1993 there has been a rapid increase in the use of the internet for different purposes particularly for electronic trade in such a new trade area there are a lot of issues to be addressed with regard to the consumer s purchasing behaviour this study analyses the roles of sexual preference primary place of online access and online experience as well as demographic and economic factors on the consumer s purchasing decision moreover this study investigates the impact of the potential and or prevalent critical issues facing the internet e g taxation of services privacy censorship etc on online orders surprisingly sexual preferences have a large significant effect on online purchases gay and bisexual people are more likely to shop from the internet than the other ones the results also suggest that people with more online experiences in a more private and secure environment like home are disposed to order more from the internet in addition to that

mixed oligopoly privatization and subsidization abstract this paper demonstrates three effects of domestic production subsidies in a mixed oligopoly industry regarding privatization and efficiency first if subsidies are used before and after privatization welfare is unchanged by privatization second if subsidies are used only before privatization then privatization always lowers welfare regardless of the number of private firms in the industry third the subsidy contributes to overall efficiency in a mixed oligopoly due to cost distribution effects