the nonlinear relationship between terrorism and poverty in spite of the common wisdom that poverty breeds terrorism in their meta study gassebner and luechinger 2011 report that the two robust explanatory variables for terrorism are population and various measures of democratic freedom but not per capita gdp their results from 13 4 million different regressions estimated using various combinations of the 65 variables contained in 43 different studies indicate no significant causal effects between terrorism and per capita gdp we add to the large and growing literature on the relationship between terrorism and poverty in two ways first unlike previous studies we use a dataset that decomposes the number of terrorist acts into domestic and transnational incidents we show that poverty has a very distinct effect on each type of terrorism second we use split sample and smooth transition regression star estimation techniques to allow for a nonlinear relationship between terrorism and poverty when we account for the nonlinearities in the data and distinguish between the two types of terrorist events we find that poverty has as a very strong influence on domestic terrorism and a small but significant effect on transnational terrorism

cost reduction competition and industry performance in many markets firms compete over time by expending resources with the purpose of reducing their costs sometimes the cost reducing investments operate directly on costs in many instances they take the form of developing new products that deliver what customers need more cheaply therefore product development can have the same ultimate effect as direct cost reduction in fact if one thinks of the product as the services it delivers to the customer in the way that lancaster pioneered then product development often is just cost reduction

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

multidimensional mechanism design for auctions with externalities abstract in an auction with externalities a buyer s type is multidimensional and specifies the payoff he would get for each of the n 1 possible outcomes the seller keeps the object or buyer i i 1 n gets the object we provide a characterization of multidimensional incentive compatible mechanisms similar to that for one dimensional mechanisms although reservation utilities are endogenous and type dependent the participation constraint is binding for only one critical type a main difficulty in a multidimensional setting is the integrability condition we present a geometric characterization for discontinuous conservative vector fields in auctions where the buyers submit scalar bids and the seller transfers the object to one of the buyers for sure a second price auction maximizes revenue with two buyers this auction remains optimal even if the seller can set a reservation price journal of economic literature classification numbers c7 c72

the resurgence of inflation in brazil 1974 1986 abstract this paper examines various factors which contributed to the resurgence of inflation in brazil in the 1970s and 1980s and the reasons for the failure of ortodox austerity programs to control it the evidence seems to black the school of thought which considers the best explanation for the recent inflationary experience to lie with the spread of formal and informal indexing leading to an inertial type of inflation the latter has led some economists to recommend heterodox methods of inflation control an epilogue briefly describes brazil s recent attempt to apply such methods

r d policies trade and process innovation we set up a simple trade model with two countries hosting one firm each the firms invest in cost reducing r d and each government may grant r d subsidies to the domestic firm we show that it is optimal for a government to provide higher r d subsidies the lower the level of trade costs even if the firms are independent monopolies if firms produce imperfect substitutes policy competition may become so fierce that only one of the firms survives international policy harmonization eliminates policy competition and ensures a symmetric outcome however it is shown that harmonization is not necessarily welfare maximizing the optimal coordinated policies may imply an asymmetric outcome with r d subsidies to only one of the firms

breaking up a research consortium inter firm r d collaborations through contractual arrangements have become increasingly popular but in many cases they are broken up without any joint discovery we provide a rationale for the breakup date in r d collaboration agreements more specifically we consider a research consortium initiated by a firm a with a firm b b has private information about whether it is committed to the project or a free rider we show that under fairly general conditions a breakup date in the contract is a second best optimal screening device for firm a to screen out free riders with the additional constraint of renegotiation proofness a can only partially screen out free riders entry by some free riders makes sure that a does not have an incentive to renegotiate the contract ex post we also propose empirical strategies for identifying the three likely causes of a breakup date adverse selection moral hazard and project non viability

symmetry breaking in two player games via strategic substitutes and diagonal nonconcavity a synthesis abstract this paper is an attempt to develop a unified approach to symmetry breaking in strategic models arising in industrial organization by constructing two general classes of two player symmetric games that always possess only asymmetric pure strategy nash equilibria these classes of games are characterized in some abstract sense by two general properties payoff nonconcavities and some form of strategic substitutability our framework relies on easily verified assumptions on the primitives of the game and relies on the theory of supermodular games the underlying natural assumptions are satisfied in a number of two stage models with an investment decision preceding product market competition to illustrate the generality and wide scope for application of our approach we present some existing models dealing with r d capacity expansion and information provision which motivated this study

how not to sell nuclear weapons we consider situations where a sale affects the ensuing interaction between potential buyers these situations are modeled by assuming that an agent who does not acquire the object for sale incurs an identity dependent externality we construct a revenue maximizing auction for the seller we observe that 1 outside options and participation constraints are endogenous 2 the seller extracts surplus also from agents who do not obtain the auctioned object 3 the seller is better off by not selling at all while obtaining some payments if externalities are much larger than valuations

networks of collaboration in oligopoly abstract in an oligopoly prior to competing in the market firms have an opportunity to form pair wise collaborative links with other firms these pair wise links involve a commitment of resources and lead to lower costs of production of the collaborating firms we study the incentives of firms to form links and the architecture of the resulting collaboration network we find that incentives to form links are intimately related to the nature of market competition our analysis also suggests that collaborations are used by firms to generate competitive advantage and that strategically stable networks are often asymmetric with some firms having many links while others have few links or are isolated specifically we show that networks with the dominant group architecture stars and inter linked stars are stable we also present some results on the architecture of socially efficient networks

vertical research joint ventures abstract we examine the incentives of firms to form vertical research joint ventures rjvs which enable an upstream supplier to internalize the positive externality of its innovation on a downstream market while giving the downstream members a cost advantage over their non member rivals under the cost sharing rules considered the upstream member desires a larger rjv compared to the downstream members r d subsidies may be detrimental to social welfare the optimal rjv size for the upstream downstream member decreases increases with r d cost and increases decreases with the gains from innovation and the size of market an increase in upstream competition has the effect of enlarging the optimal rjv

on the organization of cooperative research and development theory and evidence abstract it has become increasingly prevalent that business firms often rival firms join forces in cooperative r and d to develop new technologies that they can use in their downstream business equity research joint ventures and non equity co development are the two major modes of organization and they differ in how ownership rights over newly developed technologies are assigned this paper addresses the question of when cooperative r and d should be carried out in a research joint venture as opposed to a co development program in a setting of contractual incompleteness the nature of the downstream business of participating firms is shown to determine the organization of cooperative r and d empirical evidence that is consistent with the theoretical analysis is also presented

empirical inflation models in developing countries sensitivity to the definition of inflation previous developing country inflation studies have demonstrated that the harberger monetarist model s explanatory power may be quite sensitive to the time period or explanatory variables used in this study the model s sensitivity to the definition of the inflation rate variable itself the dependent variable is investigated using a cross section time series data set of 19 developing nations it is shown that the harberger model is sensitive to the manner in which inflation is defined then a similar investigation is conducted for another more recently developed model of the inflationary process the hanson model this model exhibits less sensitivity to the choice of inflation variable

research joint ventures product differentiation and price collusion abstract we investigate the interplay between firms decisions in product development either joint or independent and their ensuing repeated pricing either collusive or bertrand nash a joint venture develops a single product whereas independent ventures develop their respective products which can be differentiated we prove that joint product development and the resulting lack of horizontal product differentiation may destabilise collusion whilst firms r d decisions have no bearings on collusive sustainability if differentiation is vertical we also discover the non monotone dependence of firms venture decisions at the development stage upon their time preferences as well as upon consumers willingness to pay

optimal abatement technology adoption based upon learning by doing with spillover effect abstract we specify a general model of the dynamic abatement technology adoption process and show how the accumulated experience among them can alter the adoption timing learning by doing lbd effect is considered to describe the reduction of the costly price to the adoption moreover spillovers effect which reflects how accumulated experience can be shared among different technologies is integrated into the learning process to ensure the specification convincing some reasonable assumptions are considered such as one abatement technology must conduct its own experience in order to realize the spillover besides to investigate how the abatement process is influenced by the technology allocation under the spillovers effect an endogenous emission path is considered to necessitate a meaningful optimization problem finally apart from obtaining some basic properties of the model we implement an empirical study to verify the effectiveness of the model data from the iron industry in china is used to specify the process which can highlight the spillovers effect among different technologies from a sector angle in the results we find that intrinsic mechanism in the model results in the interplay among abatement coefficient spillover factor and the growing rate of the emission etc collaborative relationships between variables are discussed as well

optimal asymmetric strategies in research joint ventures abstract this paper identifies an overlooked implication of models of research joint ventures initiated by d aspremont and jacquemin 1988 even though the aggregate r d cost of identical firms in a research joint venture would be lowest if they invested equally to reduce subsequent production costs nonetheless members may often enlarge their overall joint profit by making unequal investments such a strategy raises costs in the investment stage but may create more than offsetting benefits in the production stage since industry profits are larger there when the firms are of unequal size when the consideration leading to asymmetry prevails we find that in contrast to previous work a research joint venture can raise welfare even when there are no spillovers

partial pooling at the reserve price in auctions with resale opportunities abstract two features common to many auctions are the use of reserve prices and the existence of secondary markets for the goods being sold even in simple symmetric settings the combination of these features can preclude existence of an equilibrium in symmetric separating bidding strategies with a reserve price sufficiently far below the maximum endogenous valuation a symmetric equilibrium still exists but with some types pooling at the reserve the optimal reserve price depends not only on the joint distribution of bidders information before and after the auction but also on how surplus is divided in the secondary market journal of economic literature classification numbers d44 c7 l1 d82

credible signals of the release of new versions i introduction many products are marketed some time after they have been developed for instance a new smartphone may be developed and tested well before it is available for purchase a new car might be prototyped and driven months before it comes to the market indeed a firm will often have several products concurrently in a development pipeline consumers may know a product is in that pipeline without knowing its progress towards the market because the outcome of such development and testing is not visible to outsiders the firm knows whether it can market a product before consumers do consumers are uninformed about when and if the new product will be marketed to them economists have long recognized that the present demand for durable goods depends on future prospects such as the future price or the introduction of an improved version 1 the existence of such an improved version is often the seller s private information if consumers anticipate a new version some will defer purchases until the new version is available and the seller will face low demand for the present version disclosing the new version is not in a monopoly seller s interest a seller whose good does not have a new version would also like to communicate that fact to consumers while a firm with a successful product innovation can credibly disclose the new version with relative ease a firm that has failed to develop a new product could have great difficulty convincing consumers that the product has no new version in such situations it is important to examine whether prices can inform consumers whether a new version will be marketed in the near future in a recent paper choi et al 2010 developed a model with a risky product development process in which reputation effects allow cheap talk announcements to signal successful product development to consumers an announcement induces consumers to delay or divert purchases to the announcer s coming product which increases the announcer s profit and can improve welfare 2 in their model the announcer and her non innovative rivals supply the original good competitively because of this an announcement does not reduce profit on the current version this paper will focus on markets where the seller has substantial market power before innovating so announcing a successful product development has a cost in terms of current revenue further because we attend to prices as signals this model may also apply to markets where a long run relationship between consumers and firms may not be sustainable another objective of this paper is to examine the welfare effects of mandatory disclosure a government policy mandating disclosure of any new version is an alternative means of informing consumers 3 as long as firms are not willing to lie to the government such a policy would credibly communicate whether a new version of a durable is coming mandatory disclosure would bring about full information as consumers are informed about any improved future version before observing the price of the current version in this paper we explore a two period model of a durable good monopoly in which consumers are initially uninformed about whether there will be a new version of the current good the monopoly seller is privately informed if he will be able to market an improved version in the second period in the first period consumers must decide whether to purchase the good now or wait for an upgraded version they may be able to infer from the price of the current version whether the seller will bring a new version to the market it is important to see first whether prices can serve as signals and second how welfare compares between any signaling outcome and a full information benchmark corresponding to mandatory disclosure we will show that there is a unique equilibrium supported by intuitive beliefs in this equilibrium the seller s private information about an improved version is completely revealed to consumers

inequality and crime this paper considers the relationship between inequality and crime using data from urban counties the behavior of property and violent crime are quite different inequality has no effect on property crime but a strong and robust impact on violent crime with an elasticity above 0 5 by contrast poverty and police activity have significant effects on property crime but little on violent crime property crime is well explained by the economic theory of crime while violent crime is better explained by strain and social disorganization theories

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

downstream r d raising rivals costs and input price contracts we analyze the incentives for cost reducing r d by downstream firms in a two tier market structure by increasing the demand for an input downstream r d allows the upstream firm to raise its input price this lowers the benefit of r d to a downstream firm but raises its rivals costs as a result a downstream oligopolist may invest more in r d than a downstream monopolist a phenomenon that is absent in a purely horizontal r d setting fixed price agreements where the input price remains unchanged following downstream r d promote innovation by eliminating the opportunistic behavior of the input supplier and are welfare enhancing

an empirical evaluation of the determinants of research joint venture formation this paper empirically analyses the determinants of rm participation in research joint ventures rjvs a review of the theoretical literature highlights the di culty of identifying testable hypotheses using a large database of european rjvs we estimate a participation equation at the rm level using the logit procedure we nd that sectorial r d intensity industry concentration rm size technological spillovers and past rjv participation positively in uence the probability of forming rjvs by contrast patents eiectiveness reduce the likelihood of rjv formation last country xed eiects suggest that rms from larger countries are less likely to participate in cross border rjvs i introduction research joint ventures rjvs are agreements whereby rms decide to share technological knowledge while in principle continuing to compete against each other in the product market the aim of this paper is empirically to identify the rm and industry characteristics that determine rjv formation recent theoretical contributions have highlighted the complex mechanisms that underlie rjv participation first rjvs involve the internalisation of technological spillovers and r d cost sharing as well as the assimilation of knowledge that may be of strategic importance

r d cooperation in smes the direct effect and the moderating role of human capital abstractwe analyse the determinants of r d cooperation for smes in italy we introduce in the literature human capital as one of the main determinants of r d cooperation concentrating on its moder

endogenous formation of research coalitions with spillovers abstract we examine the endogenous formation of research coalitions with high spillovers among symmetric firms members of a research coalition set their r and d investments in order to maximize the aggregate profits of members of their coalition the exclusive membership rule supports a more concentrated coalition structure and thus leads to higher industry r and d investments for high spillovers than the open membership rule does however due to free riding problems the grand research coalition which is the socially efficient outcome is rarely an equilibrium outcome under either rule our results suggest that government subsidies to research consortia for basic research with high spillovers can improve social welfare by encouraging wider participation to a research consortium that is by alleviating free rider problems in coalition formation from a more theoretical viewpoint our results on stable coalition structures are applicable to a wide variety of economic coalitions with positive externalities

income inequality and violent crime evidence from mexico s drug war the relationship between income inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many researchers but little convincing evidence exists on the causal effect of inequality on crime in developing countries this paper estimates this effect in a unique context mexico s drug war the analysis takes advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and crime statistics for more than 2 000 mexican municipalities covering a period of 20 years using an instrumental variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse causality and omitted variable bias this paper finds that an increment of one point in the gini coefficient translates into an increase of more than 10 drug related homicides per 100 000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010 there are no significant effects before 2005 the fact that the effect was found during mexico s drug war and not before is likely because the cost of crime decreased with the proliferation of gangs facilitating access to knowledge and logistics lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior which combined with rising inequality increased the expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005

designing a private industry government auctions with endogenous market structure abstract this paper considers government mechanisms for auctioning production rights in which both the winners and the market structure doupoly dual sourcing monopoly sole sourcing or government owned production are a function of the bids in designing the optimal mechanism the government considers the tradeoffs among consumer surplus producer surplus and revenue under incomplete information doupoly is implemented less frequently and government production more frequently than under complete information when bidders are symmetric the optimal mechanism can be implemented as a modified second price auction applications to privatization deregulation and defense procurement are discussed

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

noncooperative versus cooperative r d with endogenous spillover rates this paper deals with a general version of a two stage model of r d and product market competition we provide a thorough generalization of previous results on the comparative performance of noncooperative and cooperative r d dispensing in particular with ex post firm symmetry and linear demand assumptions we also characterize the structure of profit maximizing r d cartels where firms competing in a product market jointly decide r d expenditure as well as internal spillover levels we establish the firms would essentially always prefer extremal spillovers and within the context of a standard specification derive conditions for the optimality of minimal spillover

persistence of innovation in dutch manufacturing is it spurious this paper studies the persistence of innovation and the dynamics of innovation output in dutch manufacturing using firm data from three waves of the community innovation surveys cis pertaining to the periods 1994 1996 1996 1998 and 1998 2000 we estimate by maximum likelihood a dynamic panel data type 2 tobit model accounting for individual effects and handling the initial conditions problem we find that there is no evidence of true persistence in achieving technological product or process innovations while past shares of innovative sales condition albeit to a small extent current shares of innovative sales

the impact of classes of innovators on technology financial fragility and economic growth in this article we study innovation processes and technological change in an agent based model by including a behavioral switching among heterogeneous innovative firms the model is able to replicate via simulations well known industrial dynamic and growth type stylized facts the main original element of the model is that firms are allowed to endogenously change among three different classes namely single innovators collaborative innovators and imitators moreover our analysis focuses on the impact of these three innovation categories on micro meso and macro aggregates we find that collaborative companies are those having the highest positive impact on the economic system furthermore we have paid particular attention to the role of credit market in promoting smart growth for this purpose we analyze the role of banks as sources of external funds for innovative entrepreneurs our results suggest a trade off between short term profit maximization and long term efficiency which prevents banks to foster investment in r d and technological progress the model is then used to study the effect that different innovation policies have on macroeconomic performance

when failure becomes success class and the debate over stabilization and adjustment abstract this article criticizes the current debate over stabilization and adjustment and develops an alternative class analytic approach first the respective theories and policy recommendations of neoclassical and structuralist economist are analyzed then the article considers the recent experiences of argentina brazil and peru where orthodox and heterodox policies have been attempted and subsequently declared failures finally it is shown that those failures with respect to employment inflation and the balance of payments become successes to the extent that they involve increasing exploitation and otherwise strengthening the class aspects of capitalism

upstream horizontal mergers vertical contracts and bargaining abstract we study horizontal mergers in the upstream sectors of vertically related industries when bargaining is present and contract types are endogenous we demonstrate that the contract types used can have significant implications for the equilibrium market structure and vice versa when trading takes place through two part tariff contracts merger incentives are absent however when the downstream firms are powerful merger incentives are restored since the merger leads then either to the exclusive or to the partial use of wholesale price contracts finally we show that whenever a merger occurs it is welfare detrimental

on vertical relations and the timing of technology adoption we study the timing of new technology adoption in markets with input outsourcing and thus with vertical relations we find that technology adoption can take place earlier when firms engage in input outsourcing than when they produce the input in house hence the presence of vertical relations can accelerate the adoption of a new technology we also find that particular features of a vertically related market such as the distribution of bargaining power and the contract type through which trading is conducted can crucially affect the speed of technology adoption

selling licences for a process innovation the impact of the product market on the selling mechanism this article considers the sale by a research lab of licences for a cost reducing innovation the marginal cost of a firm that wins a licence is private information and the acquisition of a licence imposes a negative externality on the other firms the lab s optimal revenue is determined from a class of mechanisms in which the lab selects the number of licences and the reserve price before the sale the role of the downstream product market in the determination of the number of licences is analyzed furthermore it is also shown that the optimal reserve price may be zero jel classification d82 li3

equilibrium and optimal size of a research joint venture in an oligopoly with spillovers this paper analyzes a simple oligopoly model with information spillovers firms spend on r d to affect their costs of production the main finding is that depending on the magnitude of the spillover the market may not provide enough incentives for the optimum degree of cooperation to take place it is shown that the equilibrium size of a research joint venture is usually less than the optimum size which requires all firms to participate in the research joint venture the policy implications of this result are that there should be encouragement for firms competing in high technology industries to form industry wide cooperative agreements copyright 1995 by blackwell publishing ltd

the degree of spillovers and the number of rivals for maximum effective r d abstract the amount of cost reduction or effective r d that results in a symmetric sequential nash equilibrium with quadratic payoffs and differentiated goods is shown to increase with spillovers in oligopolies with a few rivals and to achieve a maximum for spillovers that are not perfect in industries with many firms similar tendencies apply for consumer surplus profits and static welfare more rivals typically lead to reduced investments output and profitability while consumer surplus and welfare increase or at least do not decrease limited entry in markets with a few rivals may enhance innovative investments profitability and consumer surplus if only product differentiation and spillovers are sufficiently high and r d costs sufficiently low too many rivals will then again lead to reductions and a decrease in static welfare

inflationary effects of changes in effective exchange rates ldcs experience the inflationary effects of devaluations in less developed countries is investigated using rate of change of effective exchange rates it is shown that for most countries in the sample devaluations or depreciations are inflationary during the current floating exchange rate system in addition to inflationary effects of depreciations excees money supply imported inflation and expectation are also identified as additional sources of inflation in less developed countries

poverty and distorted industrialization in the brazilian northeast abstract dramaric federal intervention and extensive industrialization in the brazilian northeast have not overcome its stagnant economy and society after centuries of isolation and dependence on sugar exports the northeast was integrated economicallu into brazil during 1930 1960 and since then it has been partially industrialized the regional economy however is weakly integrated and highly unequal leaving local markets small industrial growth remains keyed to other parts of brazil and dependent politics distort the region s relations with brasilia social inequality is extreme prospects for the future are bleak

contracting with externalities the paper studies inefficiencies arising in contracting between one principal and n agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents trades with the principal when the principal commits to a set of publicly observable bilateral contract offers the arising inefficiency is due entirely to the externalities imposed on non signers in contrast when the principal s offers are privately observed the distortion is due to the externalities given agents equilibrium trades comparison of the two externalities determines the relative efficiency of the two contracting regimes in both cases we show that when n is large each agent can be treated as non pivotal provided that appropriate continuity assumptions are satisfied we also study the case in which the principal can condition each agent s trade on other agents messages we characterize the set of such mechanisms in which each agent s participation is voluntary when the principal can commit to any such mechanism she implements the first best outcome while threatening each deviator with the harshest possible punishment however in the presence of noise that goes to zero slower than n goes to infinity in the limit we obtain a generally inefficient outcome in which each agent feels non pivotal

optimal pricing mechanisms with unknown demand the standard profit maximizing multi unit auction intersects the submitted demand curve with a preset reservation supply curve which is determined using the distribution from which the buyers valuations are drawn however when this distribution is unknown a preset supply curve cannot maximize monopoly profits the optimal pricing mechanism in this situation sets a price to each buyer on the basis of the demand distribution inferred statistically from other buyers bids the resulting profit converges to the optimal monopoly profit with known demand as the number of buyers goes to infinity and convergence can be substantially faster than with sequential price experimentation

patent licensing to bertrand competitors abstract a cost reducing process innovation protected by a patent is sold to one of several firms engaged in price competition incomplete information about production costs yields an auction model with both private and common value components our main result is that standard auction mechanisms lead to inefficient allocations this sharply contrasts with the result obtained under complete information the inefficiency result extends to patent race frameworks which resemble all pay auctions an auction where the lowest bidder gets the patent is shown to have several equilibria one of which is efficient

innovative strategic groups in multinational industries abstract differences in innovative strategies between groups of domestic and multinational enterprises are analyzed within a two stage game model that incorporates the asymmetries in transaction costs between the two species of enterprises nash and cooperative behaviour is shown to result in different equilibrium r d strategies with the multinational companies doing typically more r d for larger markets and domestic companies focusing on specific market segments survey data from companies operating in eleven high tech multinational industries in belgium provide support for these strategic differences and show how they are related to company performance

crime inequality and unemployment in england and wales a model of crime is developed based on principles from the existing literature with some original insight the implications of the model are that income inequality and unemployment are important explanatory variables for crimes motivated by economic gain but do not offer much explanatory power for other types of crime panel data of uk regions over the years from 2002 to 2007 are then used to test these predictions the empirical results strongly support the hypothesis that crime is an economic phenomenon

bidding for the future signaling in auctions with an aftermarket abstract this paper considers auctions where bidders compete for an advantage in future strategic interactions when bidders wish to exaggerate their private information equilibrium bidding functions are biased upwards as bidders attempt to signal via the winning bid signaling is most prominent in second price auctions where equilibrium bids are above value in english and first price auctions signaling is less extreme since the winner incurs the cost of her signaling choice the opportunity to signal lowers bidders payoffs and raises revenue when bidders understate their private information separating equilibria need not exist and the auction may not be efficient

does income inequality lead to more crime a comparison of cross sectional and time series analyses of united states counties abstract this paper estimates the effect of income inequality on crime in united states counties using both cross sectional and first differenced approaches income inequality is positively associated with crime rates in the cross section analysis but negatively associated with crime rates in the time series analysis

r d cooperation or competition abstract the economic literature provides empirical evidence of the existence of technological cartels such as research joint ventures or deliberate sharing of technological knowledge our aim is to answer to the questions i is the creation of technological cartels beneficial from a social welfare point of view and ii do the firms have private incentives to form such cartels we depart from the approach adopted in the literature by considering a dynamic model and allowing for the possibility that the firms are asymmetric the results show the importance of the degree of existing technological spillovers and stress the differences between the symmetric and asymmetric cases

convergence to symmetry in dynamic strategic models of r d the undiscounted case abstract will r d increase or decrease the asymmetry between firms over time we examine this issue in the context of a dynamic alternate move duopoly model of non cooperative r d the asymmetry we consider is with respect to the initial stocks of technological knowledge which provides one firm a greater potential for current and future profits in the product market utilizing a value loss process constructed from the optimality equation of dynamic programming we show that for the undiscounted case the asymmetry between the firms disappears over time we obtain this convergence to symmetry result by imparting a temporal character to r d through the notion that r d investment cannot be changed instantaneously by allowing research externalities complementarity or substitutability between own and appropriated r d and either increasing decreasing or constant returns to scale in the production of technical knowledge from own and rival r d

european market integration through technology driven m as merger and acquisitions m as have been an important tool for reorganizing the european market since the establishment of european economic and monetary union this article suggests that european integration helped and encouraged european firms to source technology across national borders in europe establishing european innovative firms the figures confirm that once barriers impeding the free movement of capital goods and labour had fallen european firms used m as intensively to enter foreign european markets enhancing technology competencies is found to be one of the main motives for cross border acquisitions in the 1990s but is not a factor in domestic acquisitions over the same period

crime during the business cycle urban rural differences abstractdespite the abundant literature on how crime evolves over the business cycle no consensus has arisen whether crime increases or decreases during recessions the literature provides both po

japanese research consortia a microeconometric analysis of industrial policy despite the existence of much theoretical research analyzing the potential benefits and costs of r d consortia there has been little corresponding empirical work on their efficacy in this paper we undertake a large sample econometric study of japanese government sponsored research consortia we find evidence that frequent participation in these consortia has a positive impact on research expenditure and research productivity these results hold after controlling for the potential endogeneity of intensity of participation in consortia to participating firms research productivity furthermore we find evidence that part of this impact arises from the increased knowledge spillovers that take place within these consortia

neighbourhood income inequality and property crime this paper examines the relationship between income inequality and property crime using census block group data from three us cities nashville tn portland or and tucson az this paper is one o

the design of an efficient private industry government sponsored auctions for production rights e g license auctions privatizations etc shape the industry structure are there mechanisms that induce an efficient industry structure at least when there are no positive costs to public funds the answer is no whenever firms have private information about both fixed and marginal costs our analysis also suggests that the second best industry may either be more competitive or more monopolistic than the first best one these insights are in sharp contrast with the ones obtained for models where firms have one dimensional private information thus requiring more delicate policy recommendations jel d43 d45 d82 l1

cooperation in r d the case of patent infringement agreements abstract this paper provides an insurance based argument behind patent infringement agreements pia such agreements constitute a form of cooperation in an otherwise non cooperative environment we develop a model where firms initially hold certain patents and undertake further r d by pursuing the latter they face a positive probability of infringing the patents held by the other a prior infringement agreement generates a binding contract so that such infringements would go unpunished if the infringing probability is not too low firms would have incentive to sign an agreement and sacrifice the monopoly option but this depends on the information structure about the patent infringement and search costs such a prior agreement is then compared and contrasted with a suitably designed ex post contract

product differentiation process r d and the nature of market competition abstract we investigate the relationship between process and product rd ii bertrand firms have a stronger incentive for product rd and iii cooperation in product r d promotes both types of r d relative to competition whereas cooperation in both types of r d discourages r d relative to cooperation in just product r d

symmetric research joint ventures cooperative substitutes and complements we introduce the concepts of cooperative substitutes and complements and use them to explain when all firms in a research joint venture will choose equal levels of r d we show that the second order conditions for a symmetric optimum take a particularly simple form ruling out both excessive cooperative substitutability and excessive cooperative complementarity and nesting conditions already derived in the literature finally we apply our results to the comparison between cooperative and non cooperative r d and show in an important special case that asymmetric outcomes are only optimal for a very limited range of parameter values

collusion and dynamic under investment in quality in a dynamic game of investment in product quality i investigate whether collusive underinvestment equilibria can be supported by the threat of escalation in investment outlays when there are no spillovers underinvestment equilibria exist even though by deviating a firm can gain a persistent strategic advantage when there are strong spillovers underinvestment equilibria fail to exist a weakening of patent protection can thus lead to more investment in equilibrium a nonfragmentation result is shown to hold in all free entry equilibria industry concentration is bounded away from zero no matter how large the market and despite the existence of underinvestment equilibria

downstream research joint venture with upstream market power in a vertically related industry we examine the downstream firms incentives to invest in cost reducing research and development r d and to form a research joint venture rjv under two alternative structures of input supply exclusive vertical relations and a single supplier in contrast to the hold up argument in which downstream firms invest non cooperatively and spillovers are low r d investments are higher under a single supplier than under competing vertical chains downstream firms incentives to form a rjv are also stronger in the former case than they are in the latter we identify conditions under which an rjv is beneficial for society integrated innovation and competition policies are also discussed

income inequality and pecuniary crimes abstract this paper verifies the relationship between income inequality and pecuniary crimes the elasticity of pecuniary crimes relative to inequality is 1 46 corroborating previous literature other factors important to decrease criminality are expanding job opportunities and a more efficient legal system

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

cooperative r d between vertically related firms with spillovers abstract this paper analyzes the effects of cooperative r d in two vertically related duopolies which are two final good manufacturers and two input suppliers with horizontal and vertical spillovers vertical r d cartels yield a larger social welfare than non cooperative r d and if the horizontal spillover rate between the input suppliers is not sufficiently high than horizontal r d cartels technological improvement is accelerated by forming vertical research joint ventures rjvs whether or not their member firms r d decisions are coordinated vertical rjv cartels yield the largest social welfare when the vertically related firms can coordinate their r d decisions and or share useful knowledge fully

optimal r d levels when firm j benefits from firm i s inventive activity abstract we amend the static model of industry structure in dasgupta and stiglitz to include external benefits from a firm s r d now the market can be seen to underinvest in r d relative to the social optimum the work of mansfield suggests that such external benefits are pervasive

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

endogenous timing in the presence of non monotonicities the aim of this paper is to generalize the endogenous timing game proposed by hamilton and slutsky games and economic behavior 1990 2 pp 29 46 by allowing the payoff or the marginal payoff of a player to become non monotonic with respect to the strategy of the opponent we propose a taxonomy of the subgame perfect nash equilibria based on the characteristics of the payoff functions proposed by eaton canadian journal of economics 2004 37 pp 805 29 we determine under which conditions of the initial payoff functions commitment has a social value and when the simultaneous move nash equilibrium is commitment robust and discuss its pareto efficiency

bidding for a process innovation under alternative modes of competition abstract this paper examines whether a first price sealed bid auction is efficient in allocating a process innovation amongst oligopolists engaged in either cournot or bertrand competition standard bidding behavior is modified by the incentive to signal private information in order to influence the oligopoly outcome it is shown that for cournot there exists a unique equilibrium in strictly increasing strategies that is symmetric and therefore allocatively efficient for bertrand an efficient equilibrium may not exist however efficiency is restored as the market becomes perfectly competitive the results underline the sensitivity of efficient auction design to downstream market structures

inflation indexing and economic development abstract recent analyses have established that there are significant costs as well as benefits to issuing indexed bonds an assessment of the desirability of indexing hasproven to be clusive perhaps because of the complexity involved in formulating the presumably government preferences by which indexing is to be evaluated and in ascertaining the optimal government policy with which to accompany indexing this paper develops a general framework for examining indexed bonds the envelope theorem is exploited to derive a convenient representation of the effects of indexing the crucial elements in evaluating indexed bonds are the relative desirabilities of transferring purchasing power to the government and reducing consumer liquidity the greater is the relative importance placed on the former the more likely are the effects of indexed bonds to be favorably evaluated

endogenous spillovers and the performance of research joint ventures we present a model of r d with endogenous spillovers and demonstrate that noncooperation can produce maximal spillovers the only other noncooperative outcome is minimal spillovers when noncooperation achieves maximal spillovers so does an rjv whereas minimal noncooperative spillovers imply partial but not necessarily maximal spillovers by an rjv partial rjv spillovers are chosen for anti competitive reasons and an rjv may also close a lab for anti competitive reasons the possibility of anti competitive outcomes is precluded in the existing literature on rjvs which focuses on symmetric outcomes our model predicts when anti competitive behaviour by an rjv arises

the elementary economics of social dilemmas a social dilemma is in essence a prisoners dilemma in a continuous strategy space i discuss a number of social dilemmas that have caught my attention offer an elementary diagrammatic synthesis of them and discuss some of the economic insights that the diagrams capture including incentives for pre commitment finally i model pre commitment via delegation and link results to the literature on the evolution of preferences l economie elementaire des dilemmes sociaux un dilemme social est essentiellement un dilemme du prisonnier dans un espace continu de strategie l auteur discute d un certain nombre de dilemmes sociaux qui ont retenu son attention il en propose une synthese graphique elementaire et discute certaines des suggestions economiques qui decoulent de ces diagrammes comme par exemple les incitations a se pre engager finalement l auteur construit un modele de pre engagement par delegation et relie ses resultats a la litterature sur l evolution des references

uncertainty spillovers and cooperative r d abstract this paper extends the literature on cooperative r d in an oligopoly with spillovers the model has three new features it introduces uncertainty focuses on spillover of innovation instead of effort spillover and offers a new definition of the research joint venture rjv the rjv is an arrangement to coordinate r d efforts and also to share the innovation firms form an rjv only if the innovation raises flow industry profit but independently of the speed of spillovers and the degree of uncertainty the model is robust when we allow for licensing the single lab endogenous spillovers and r d effort spillovers

canaries and vultures a quantitative history of monetary mismanagement in brazil during the last two decades of the twentieth century brazil went through a sequence of failed stabilization plans that tried to cope with an enduring hyperinflation this paper uses a money demand model to evaluate monetary policies during those episodes consistency between money supply and expected conditional money demand growth rates is considered for each plan it is shown that unsuccessful programs were marked by excessive liquidity the results not only suggest that monetary mismanagement led to the failure of the plans but also that the excessive liquidity could have been predicted