ALBERT

Notes: We consider the general problem of price discrimination with nonlinear pricing in an oligopoly setting where firms are spatially differentiated. We characterize the nature of optimal pricing schedules, which in turn depends importantly upon the type of private information the customer possesses–either horizontal uncertainty regarding brand preference or vertical uncertainty regarding quality preference. We show that as competition increases, the resulting quality distortions decrease, as well as price and quality dispersions. Additionally, we indicate conditions under which price discrimination may raise social welfare by increasing consumer surplus through encouraging greater entry.

Notes: We model an internal labor market in which employee behavior and compensation are affected by the firm's financial position and the threat of hostile takeover or other exercise of shareholder “voice.” We show how good past performance can result in excessively generous promotion and pay decisions. While the threat of shareholder activism will remove this “slack,” activists optimally face a positive cost barrier, which in turn varies across firms. The cost barrier is higher when cooperation or “helping” between employees is more important, and is lower when employees receive efficiency wages due to an inability to “pay” for their jobs. Since the importance of helping is associated with pay compression and “flat” pay ladders, such firms should also exhibit a greater degree of management entrenchment.

Notes: The literature on the incentives for R & D cooperation with spillovers typically deals only with the factors affecting cooperative profits. This paper focuses on the incentives to cheat and the stability of such cooperative agreements in a repeated game framework. It is shown that the stability of cooperation is influenced by the nature and magnitude of spillovers, relative to the nature and degree of product market competition. While cooperative profits are higher with large positive (exogenous, unintended) know-how spillovers, such as in fundamental research, our anslysis shows that it may be easier to sustain cooperation in areas with lower spillovers, such as applied research, because of the smaller incenfives to cheat on the initial agreement, at least when firms produce substitutes. Alternatively, the possibility of technology sharing (i.e., intended or endogenous spillovers), besides R&D coordination, not only increases cooperative profits but also reduces the incentives to defect from a cooperative equilibrium.

Notes: In a moral hazard setting, we model the fact that the agent may get private signals about the final outcome of his effort before the public realization of this outcome. Actions affect both the distribution of the outcome and the quality of the agent's private information. We compare simple contracts, based on output only, with revelation contracts, based on output and messages about signals. Revelation contracts give the agent some discretionary power during the course of the relationship; they are optimal if and only if lowering effort does not increase the quality of private information in the sense of Blackwell (1953). In the context of managerial compensation schemes, the revelation contracts we analyze can be viewed as allowing the agent to exercise an option on the final profits before the realization of these profits. The theory thus provides an alternative justification of the widespread use of stock options in managerial compensation schemes, as opposed to compensation schemes that rely only on salary, bonus, and (restricted) stock plans.

Notes: This paper explores the conditions under which a monopolist selling a system consisting of a main component and differentiated secondary components can increase profits by allowing competition in the aftermarket for the secondary components. Opening the system in this fashion can increase profits by giving consumers an added incentive to incur the setup cost of purchasing the main component. This paper extends the second-sourcing literature by showing the explicit effects of various parameters of demand on the decision to open the system. The results show that an open system is likely to be more profitable than a closed one when demand for the system is more elastic, when secondary-component variety is more valued, and when the share of the main component in the total system budget of the consumer is high.

Notes: This paper contrasts assignments to punitive tasks and terminations as alternative incentive devices. The basic question we ask here is: does the threat of assigning employees to a punitive task allow one to attain higher effort levels than termination threats? The answer critically depends on whether employers are able or not to commit themselves not to fire. We show that in the no-commitment case the only relevant incentive device is termination threats. In contrast, when employers commit themselves not to fire, by threatening punitive task reassignments there obtain effort levels that are not implementable by termination. The implementation results are then applied to the study of incentive problems arising when investment infirm-specific human capital is unverifiable.

Notes: Analysis of seven wholesale and retail markets for long-distance telephone services since the AT & T divestiture indicates that service provider concentration declined in the later 1980s and then stabilized in the 2990–1993 period. In addition to this stability in market shares, a number of other conditions established since 1990 have been conducive to the development of market sharing rather than significant price competition. The most important of these conditions has been the tarifing process of the Federal Communications Commission by which MCI and Sprint replicate ATGT's price announcements. As market shares stabilized and became more equal, and as regulation formalized the price-setting process, the price-cost margins of the three large carriers increased and became more nearly identical. These results are consistent not with price competition but rather with emerging tacit collusion among AT&T, MCI, and Sprint.

Notes: The Federal Communications Commission held its first auction of radio spectrum at the Nationwide Narrowband PCS Auction in July 1994. The simultaneous multiple-round auction, which lasted five days, was an ascending bid auction in which all licenses were offered simultaneously. This paper describes the auction rules and how bidders prepared for the auction. The full history of bidding is presented. Several questions for auction theory are discussed. In the end, the government collected $617 million for ten licenses. The auction was viewed by all as a huge success an excellent example of bringing economic theory to bear on practical problems of allocating scarce resources.

Notes: This study examines the investment patterns of all large local exchange telephone companies in the United States over time. It identifies how different regulatoy environments have influenced the recent historical pattern of investment in modern infrastructure equipment. It focuses exclusively on the postdivestiture experience of local telephone exchange companies (LECs). It examines the growth of fiber-optic deployment and of complementary equipment associated with the modernization of today's information infrastructure. The study estimates the influence of different regulatory structures on infrastructure deployment by LECs. The study is unique in that if relates individual LEC investment patterns to LEC-specific regulatory, demographic, and economic characteristics. Thus, it isolates the contribution of state regulatory policies from that of other demographic and economic factors in the determination of infrastructure deployment at the state LEC rather than at the corporate level. Its main findings are as follows: First, price regulation (and, in particular, price caps) is a more potent regulatory mechanism than the standard earnings sharing scheme. Second, when associated with an earnings sharing scheme, price regulation is less effective in triggering infrastructure deployment than when it is implemented by itself. These results raise questions about the effectiveness of a popular regulatory instrument-earnings sharing schemes-and highlight the effectiveness of generic price-cap regulation. These results have implications for the design of regulatory policy at both the state and federal levels. In particular, given the importance currently being placed on the development of the information superhighway, regulatory emphasis should be focused more on price regulation than on regulating profits.

Notes: The House and Senate of the United States Congress recently passed legislation that directs the FCC to establish a system for using auctions to allocate the use of radio spectrum for personal communications services. There is a unique and unprecedented set of issues that arise in this context, which are of interest to economists, industry analysts, regulators, and policymakers. We discuss these issues and evaluate their likely impact on the outcome of the spectrum auctions. In addition, we argue that there may be pitfalls in the auction procedure adopted by the FCC, and we discuss possible alternative procedures.

Notes: Royalty payments from a franchisee to a franchisor serve as incentive for the franchisor to provide appropriate levels of quality and brand, name investment. However, since they also distort the service provided by the franchisee, we should expect relatively lower royalty rates in franchises that are primarily service-oriented. Casual examination of royalty rates across product-oriented and service-oriented franchises shows that the opposite is true, with service-type franchises enjoying higher royalty rates. We resolve this apparent puzzle. The basic argument we put forth is that in product-type franchises, a franchisor can charge a wholesale price on goods transferred to the franchisee, thus using an alternative instrument that also serves as an incentive for the franchisor. Moreover, in general, a franchisor will use both wholesale price and royalty to minimize distortions in retail price and service at the retail level. We then test the predictions of our model on different industries and find confirmation for the same.

Notes: This paper examines some policy issues related to the interaction between internal and external corporate control mechanisms—board dismissals and takeovers—by focusing on the information aggregation and other effects related to this interaction. We model the functioning of corporate control mechanisms as an example of a multilayered principal-agent relationship in which shareholders delegate the task of monitoring management quality to the board and rely on the external takeover market to provide additional disciplining of the manager as well as of the board. This gives rise to two effects: (1) a substitution effect, whereby the takeover market partially substitutes for board dismissal of the manager, leading to greater lenience toward the manager by a board acting in the shareholders' best interest, and (2) a kick-in-the-pants effect, whereby the board is stricter with the manager because it may be dismissed by a successful acquirer who views it as lax. The interaction of these two effects leads to various implications about the behavior of boards and potential acquirers. In particular, a well-functioning internal control mechanism (the board) does not obviate the need for external control (takeovers). Moreover, somewhat counterintuitively, there may be a greater incidence of takeovers when the internal control mechanism is working well than when it is not.

Notes: I analyze the marketing strategy of an incumbent monopolist facing a threat of entry. Product quality is unknown to consumers, and the monopolist's cost is unknown to the potential entrant. The incumbent uses both price and advertising to signal cost and quality. The monopolist faces a dilemma because signaling a high quality attracts customers but requires a high price, whereas signaling low cost prevents entry but requires a low price. I characterize the unique (stable) separating equilibrium and show that dissipative advertising may be used, while it is never used if either quality or cost is known. Some equilibria may involve pooling on cost. A welfare analysis indicates that potential entry may improve welfare and that the effect of unknown quality is not always negative when it interferes with entry deterrence.

Notes: This paper examines minimum advertised price (MAP), a vertical restraint that is observed in manufacturer-retailer interactions. Under MAP, the manufacturer announces that it will reimburse retailers for a fraction of their advertising expenditures if retailers do not advertise the product at below a specified price. MAP can be considered a combination of resale price maintenance (RPM) and a cooperative advertising subsidy. Current antitrust law treats RPM as illegal per se, whereas MAP is judged according to a rule of reason. A framework is presented within with neither a minimum retail price nor a cooperative advertising subsidy is individually sufficient to enable maximization of profits in the complete manufacturer-retailer structure, but the two instruments together are. MAP is therefore a sufficient instrument for the maximization of joint profits. We argue that MAP can also be designed as a second-best instrument that replicates RPM.

Notes: The average chief executive at one of Britain's twelve regional electricity distribution companies experienced nearly a threefold salary increase in the two years following the industry privatization in 1990. It is hard to account for the tremendous pay raises with conventional explanations for executive compensation rates. They are not attributable to increases in managerial talent, because privatization brought virtually no changes in personnel at the top rank. In addition, the salary increases did not coincide with dramatic changes in firm scale, and cross-firm differences in the raises are uncorrelated with stock-market returns and other measures of firm performance. By contrast, salary increases are highly correlated with firms' potential profits (as measured by the administratively assigned price cap). The findings presented here thus provide new perspectives on the determinants of executive compensation.

Notes: Sellers of consumer durables often provide financing to customers. This paper shows that when customers desire consumption smoothing and when financial markets are imperfect, a seller can find it optimal to offer a menu of deferred-payment plans. A monopolist seller price discriminates among customers with different intertemporal income profiles by making such menu offers, and the interest rate on the seller credit can be significantly lower than the market borrowing rate. Seller financing can be an equilibrium outcome in a game where sellers and banks with market power choose payment plans and interest rates strategically.

Notes: Television networks spend about 16% of their revenues on tune-ins, which are previews or advertisements for their own shows. In this paper, we examine two questions. First, what is the informational content in advertising? Second, is this level of expenditures consistent with profit maximization? To answer these questions, we use a new and unique micro-level panel dataset on the television viewing decisions of a large sample of individuals, matched with data on show tune-in advertisements. The difference in effectiveness of advertisements between “regular” shows (about which viewers are assumed to have substantial information a priori) and “specials” (about which they have very little) reveals the value of information in advertisements and the different roles that information can play. The number of exposures for each individual is likely to be correlated with their preferences, since networks target their audiences. We address this endogeneity problem by controlling for observed, and integrating the unobserved, characteristics of individuals, and find that the estimated effects of tune-ins are still large. Finally, we find that actual expenditures on tune-ins closely match the predicted optimal levels of spending.

Notes: We discuss two contrasting styles of vertical organization of complementary activities or components in an industry: systems competition versus component competition. When firms' competencies differ, systems competition is not a perfect substitute for component competition, even with Bertmnd behavior. Costs, prices, industry profits, and the distribution of those profits among firms all differ between the two styles of organization. Moreover, firms' profit incentives do not generally guide them towards the socially efficient form of vertical organization. In duopoly, there is a bias towards open organization (component competition), but with enough firms (three or more, in an exponential example) this bias is reversed.

Notes: This paper proposes a simple test of the leader-follower model of strategic behavior. This test relates the temporal notions of leadership central to such models to the empirical methods of statistical causality. This test is performed using data from the US softwood plywood industry of the last three decades. Others have productively explored the spatial pricing practices of this industry by applying a leader-follower model. Similarly, we find that a leader-follower model explains well the temporal relations between key strategic variables (prices) in the industry. We conclude that the leader-follower model imposes meaningful restrictions on observable time-series data and that statistical causality is a useful method for testing these restrictions.

Notes: This paper builds an economic model of the relationship between influence activity and resistance to change in organizations. I show that influence activity can create harmful barriers to change and that the influence costs of change are positively related to the firm's prospects. The model rationalizes the widely held view that firms often must endure a survival-threatening crisis before meaningful change can be achieved. I show that employees' choices of whether to engage in influence activity can depend on their beliefs as to whether the firm will choose to change its organizational form. If employees expect change, their best response is to try to affect the form of the change in their favor.

Notes: In active investment climates where firms sequentially improve each other's products, a patent can terminate either because it expires or because a non-infringing innovation displaces its product in the market. We define the length of time until one of these happens as the effective patent life, and show how it depends on patent breadth. We distinguish lagging breadth, which protects against imitation, from leading breadth, which protects against new improved products. We compare two types of patent policy with leading breadth: (1) patents are finite but very broad, so that the effective life of a patent coincides with its statutory life, and (2) patents are long but narrow, so that the effective life of a patent ends when a better product replaces it. The former policy improves the diffusion of new products, but the latter has lower R&D costs.

Notes: We characterize equilibria of a multistage game in which competing duopolists may acquire and share information in advance of choosing their financial structure which, in turn, precedes production. Given sufficient uncertainty, equilibria exist in which the efficiency and, possibly, coordination gains to acquiring and sharing perfect information are sufficient to break Brander and Lewis's (1986) result wherein both firms issue debt to their mutual disadvantage. However, more interesting may be the robustness of that result when uncertainty is low or when information is imperfect. The key insight is that the consequences of issuing debt are invariant to the level of uncertainty, given that firms can recalibrate the terms of debt to achieve the Stackelberg solution.

Notes: We examine the nature of incentive schemes between the principal and the risk-neutral agent in the presence of the agent's limited liability and ex ante action choice. We consider alternative schemes when a simple rental contract is infeasible due to the limited liability of the agent and study the effectiveness of a performance bonus scheme in achieving the first-best outcome. We also discuss some implications of such schemes in real practices.

Notes: Recent theories of vertical integration based on incomplete contracts assume perfect competition on at least one side of the market. As a result, the make-or-buy choice has no redistributive effect and will reflect efficiency considerations only. This paper introduces imperfect competition into an otherwise standard model of a vertical relationship with noncontractable specific investments. We assume that there are a finite number of potential input suppliers with private information about their costs. We first show that a monopoly buyer of such inputs will often prefer to own the seller's assets even though it would be more efficient for the seller's assets not to be so owned. We then show that an increase in the number of potential partners on either side of the market reduces this inclination towards vertical integration. With perfect competition on either side of the market, the make-buy decision will reflect only efficiency considerations.

Notes: This paper interprets private label marketing as a retailer instrument for overcoming the double-marginalization problem inherent in the distribution of well-known manufacturer brands. Retailers with some degree of market power carry private label substitutes for popular national brands in order to capture more profit from the vertical structures they share with brand manufacturers. The net effect of private label marketing is to improve the performance of distribution channels. After presenting a formal model and deriving analytical results, the paper gathers some empirical evidence that supports these results.

Notes: This paper studies the hypothesis that large firms have more bargaining power with suppliers than do small firms, using data from the cable television industry. Employing techniques from the “new empirical lo,” the effect of owner size on marginal costs is inferred from the effect of owner size on observable product market choices. In the cable industry, the downstream firms decide how many subscriptions of cable to sell and how many channels to offer in the cable package. lf large firms have lower costs than small firms, then large firms should be willing to supply more than small firms, at all prices. The effects of bargaining power are identified separately from the effects of scale economies by exploiting the structure of the cable industry. Scale economies, in the cable industry, are likely to stem from regional size, while bargaining power is likely to stem from national size. By controlling for regional size, estimates of the effect of owner national size on the willingness to supply cable subscriptions and to offer channels indicate that large downstream firms offer significantly more subscriptions and channels at all prices than do small downstream firms. These results provide some of the first systematic, industry-specific, evidence consistent with the bargaining-power hypothesis.

Notes: The role of product warranty in segmentation of consumer durable product markets is highlighted. I demonstrate that consumer moral hazard and heterogeneity in product usage create variation in the valuation of product warranties by the different segments in the market. In this context, the firm, by offering a self-selecting menu of base warranty and extended warranties, satisfies the warranty demands of the various segments of the population. The consumer choice behavior prediction of the theory with regard to extended warranty is empirically validated with data from a survey of new car buyers.

Notes: Research on durable goods has shown that because of a time inconsistency problem, a monopolist manufacturer prefers to rent rather than sell its product. We reexamine the relative profitability of renting versus selling from a marketing perspective. In particular, using a simple linear demand formulation, we assume a durable goods monopolist has to use downstream intermediaries to market its product. In contrast to the case of an integrated monopolist, we find that when the monopolist has to rely on intermediaries, then it prefers to go through an intermediary that sells rather than one that rents its product. Similarly, the intermediary that sells the product is more profitable than the intermediary that rents the product. However, if the monopolist can commit to a set of prices, then the intermediary that rents is more profitable than the intermediary that sells.

Notes: Empirically validating and testing the specification of game theoretic models has received limited attention in the marketing literature. The authors provide an econometric framework for estimating the parameters of response functions when the observed data in the market place are the Nash equilibrium outcomes of an underlying dynamic duopoly game specification. Specifically, the estimation procedure accounts for the joint endogeneity of market shares and marketing efforts of market rivals using a system of simultaneous equations that included the market response function and the Nash equilibrium conditions. A formal statistical test is used to detect model misspecification. The empirical analysis is carried out using data from four product markets: pharmaceutical, soft drink, beer, and detergent. Comparisons are provided with conventional estimation of the response function parameters in which the equilibrium conditions are ignored in the estimation. Managerial implications of the empirical results are discussed.

Notes: Two TV channels compete on programming with respect to both time schedule (continuous choice) and program profile (discrete choice), with a directional constraint concerning time schedule (viewers cannot watch TV before they get home). We show how the relative importance of program profile and time schedule, as perceived by the viewers, determines the equilibrium outcome. Furthermore, we find that there is a first-mover disadvantage in a sequential game where one channel sets its two choice variables before its rival does, and a first-mover advantage in a semise-quential game where the channels set time schedules sequentially and thereafter set program profiles simultaneously. The results are applied to the Norwegian and Danish markets for TV news, where number-two channels have challenged the incumbents.

Notes: This paper presents a disciplinary explanation for some seemingly paradoxical stylized facts from the takeover literature. Most notable among these are: (1) hostile takeovers are predicted better by industry-wide than by firm-specific performance failures; and (2) gains from a successful bid for a specific firm extend to other firms in the same industry. Our explanation is based on the idea that managerial incentives based on relative performance evaluation may induce an inefficient industry-wide equilibrium in which all firms underperform with respect to a value-maximizing firm, but no firm underperforms with respect to the industry average. A takeover can serve as a means to destroy such an inefficient industry-wide incentive equilibrium.

Notes: Private information creates a cost of operating a hierarchy, which becomes larger as the hierarchical distance between the information source and the decision maker increases. When information about a firm's capabilities is dispersed among the individuals in the firm, production is inefficient even though everyone behaves rationally. Because hierarchies need rents in order to function, a firm with a long hierarchy may not be viable in a competitive industry.

Notes: A dynamic model of product rivalry is developed for a market in which firms choose price and advertising intensity. The model, a state-space game, is implemented using data that consist of weekly price, sales, and promotional activity for four brands of saltine crackers sold by four chains of grocery stores in a small town. A number of questions can be asked of this data. First, is advertising predatory (merely changing market shares) or cooperative (shifting out market demand)? Second, are price and advertising own and cross-strategic complements or substitutes? And finally, do investments in stocks of goodwill and in price reductions make firms tough and aggressive or soft and accommodating?

Notes: Why are moving sales a successful and widespread phenomenon? How can it be optimal for a seller to disclose her low valuation for the item to be sold? We propose an explanation based on the “lemons problem” in bargaining with asymmetric information about quality. Disclosing a low valuation signals that there are significant gains from trade, so that trade takes place when it wouldn't otherwise, and all agents are made better off.

Notes: I present tests of a competitive rationale for price promotions. In a model with a population of informed and uninformed customers, price competition yields a static equilibrium in which each seller draws a price from a specified density function. Price data on coffee and saltine crackers products are used to test whether the sample of prices on each product could have possibly come from the theoretically specified density function. The results suggest that some markets are indeed consistent with the marginal distributions of prices predicted by the model. Furthermore, in the process of testing this rationale for price promotions, estimates are obtained for the marginal cost of each product, the number of competing goods, and the percentage of informed consumers. The resulting excess variability of these estimates across competing brands can also raise questions with respect to the empirical validity of the model.

Notes: We investigate the role of consumer switching costs in a three-stage model in which the entrant and the incumbent firm set prices sequentially and then the consumers decide from which firm to buy. We characterize the unique subgame perfect equilibrium and find that even an entrant with a higher marginal cost may profitably invade part of the market due to the existence of switching costs. Switching costs benefit both firms but harm consumers. This model is used to understand pricing behavior in the US telecommunications industry.

Notes: This paper analyzes how firms' investment incentives are affected by yardstick competition in a situation in which the regulator is unable to commit himself to the regulatory contract before firms invest. Despite its rent-extracting property, yardstick competition does not necessarily reduce efficiency-improving investment. Considering firm-specific investment, yardstick competition is shown to increase investment incentives over individual regulation affirms. In this case, therefore, yardstick competition both reduces the regulator's informational problem ex post and strengthens the firms' investment incentives ex ante. If instead investment is industry-specific, incentives to invest are lowered by yardstick competition.

Notes: We investigate why different states in the United States choose different regulatory plans in their telecommunications industry. We present a simple theoretical model and an empirical analysis of the issue. We find that a state is more likely to replace rate-of-return regulation with incentive regulation when: (1) residential basic local service rates have historically been relatively high; (2) allowed earnings under rate-of-return regulation in the state have been either particularly high or particularly low; (3) the state's leaders tend to come from both major political parties, rather than from a single party; (4) the state's urban population is growing relatively rapidly; and (5) the bypass activity of competitors in the state is less pronounced.

Notes: This paper derives the decision to found a nonprofit firm as the equilibrium outcome of a multistage game among individuals who would like a public good to be provided. The model predicts that if individuals will voluntarily contribute towards provision of the public good, then it is in the self-interest of the entrepreneur to impose a nondistribution constraint on herself by founding a nonprofit firm.

Notes: This paper combines agency theory and internal-labor-market theories to explain the determinants of bonus payments among a large sample of top and middle managers from Spanish firms. A distinction is made between the decision whether to pay bonus or not and the size of the bonus. The empirical evidence confirms that the two decisions are determined by different factors. The results of the analysis show a trade-off between short-term and long-term incentives (bonuses and promotion opportunities) as well as differences in the pattern of compensation policies across economic sectors and functional areas inside the firm.

Notes: Lazear recently suggested that firms that do not expect to live for a long time will hire only safe workers. Hence their worker turnover will be lower. In this paper we test this hypothesis using both the industry growth rate and industry-average age of establishments as measures of the horizon for a particular firm. We find mixed results, both at the industry level and at the establishment level. Establishments in growing industries do indeed exhibit higher churning flows, but a high average age of establishments reduces rather than increases churning.

Notes: The paper characterizes optimal renegotiation-proof rental contracts in a model with adverse selection and hidden information. It generalizes the work of Hart and Tirole (1988) to the case of time-varying valuations. The paper considers a durable-goods monopolist who serves a nonanonymous buyer with time-varying valuation for the seller's good. The buyer's valuation has a persistent and a transient component; both are private information. The paper shows that for some range of prior beliefs the seller strictly prefers leasing to selling.

Notes: This paper examines the equilibrium degree of flexibility adopted by firms competing in oligopolistic product markets in which the value of flexibility arises from the initial presence of uncertainty over consumer preferences and its eventual resolution. The equilibrium choice of flexible mode depends on the following factors: (1) the cost of switching product design in response to revealed consumer preferences, (2) the difference in the acquisition costs of the flexible and dedicated modes, and (3) the precision of the ex ante information held by the firms regarding consumer preferences. The relationship between these factors and the equilibrium choice of modes is fully characterized.

Notes: After the initial breakthrough in the research phase of R&D, a new product undergoes a process of change, improvement, and adaptation to market conditions. We model the strategic behavior of firms in this development phase. We emphasize that a key dimension to this competition is the innovation that leads to product differentiation and quality improvement. In a duopoly model with a single adoption choice, we derive endogenously the level and diversity of product innovations. We demonstrate the existence of equilibria in which one firm enters early with a low-quality product while the other continues to develop the technology and eventually markets a high-quality good. In such an equilibrium, no monopoly rent is dissipated and the later innovator makes more profits. Incumbent firms may well be the early innovators, contrary to the predictions of the “incumbency inertia” hypothesis.

Notes: This paper addresses the strategic commitment value of various price and nonprice vertical contracts. Assuming contract offers are sufficiently public to have strategic importance, we focus on commitment as a necessary and separable condition to be met. The analysis has two components. First, considering the relationship between a monopolist manufacturer and his imperfectly competing retailers, enforcement conditions necessary for alternative vertical contracts to have commitment value are identified in the static (reputation-free) context. It is shown that external help (i.e., enforcement by nonsignatories) is necessary for bilateral minimum resale price maintenance (price floors) and exclusive territory contracts to have commitment value, whereas maximum resale price maintenance (price ceilings) do not require such help (i.e., they are internally enforcing). Second, the paper provides an analysis of the U.S. case law and discusses the empirical validity of the “external enforcement” assumption that is shown to underlie recent proposals to make certain vertical restraints illegal.

Notes: We investigate whether competition between two firms to hire managers with different abilities might affect efficiency in the product market, when a manager's effort is his/her private information. We conclude that competition for managers might lead to an improvement in efficiency in the market of the firm that attracts the most efficient manager. Competition for managers might even eliminate the productive efficiency loss due to the asymmetry of information in the firm-manager relationship.

Notes: I reconsider the implementation of efficient cost and quality efforts when health-care providers may refuse services to consumers, and introduce a mechanism that is a combination of prospective payment and cost reimbursement. Conditions are derived for the prospective payment level and the margin above cost reimbursement for the implementation of efficient efforts.

Notes: This note analyzes the incentives for cost reduction that different payment policies provide to profit-maximizing health-care providers. Ching-to Albert Ma (1994) proposes a reimbursement mechanism that seeks to induce first-best cost reduction by using a combination of cost reimbursement and prospective payment in a model where higher effort on the part of the health-care provider reduces treatment costs. This note shows that a mechanism of this type, generally, will not result in first-best cost reduction. However, such a mechanism is optimal when the payer has efficiency and distributional concerns.

Notes: Using longitudinal data, 1 estimate the impact of redistribution on the welfare cost of income risk in Germany and the United States. The estimates account fully for behavior because individuals in each country have responded optimally to that country's policy. The results indicate that the welfare cost of income risk is 5.4 percent of disposable income in Germany, 8.5 percent in the U.S. Redistribution has reduced these risks from their pre-tax, pre-transfer levels by 43 percent in Germany, 21 percent in the U.S. The political importance of income security is evident in both countries, as risk relief often eliminates the net burden of redistributive taxes among middle-class households. The conclusions are robust across several models of income expectations.

Notes: The 1993 System of National Accounts is a remarkable document, but the System also has some major imbalances and omissions. The present paper spells out four aspects of the SNA that require further development: (1) accounting for the costs of economic change; (2) delineation of information as an economic commodity; (3) overhaul of the methodology underlying input-output accounts; and, (4) consequences of the System's implicit use of compacted accounting. These developments can be incorporated in a Supplementary Document in the near future. We need not wait 25 years.

Notes: Economic Council of Canada, Employment in the Service SectorDelaunay, Jean-Claude, and Jean Gadrey, Services in Economic Thought: Three Centuries of DebateGriliches, Zvi (ed.), Output Measurement in the Service Sectors

Notes: On average, poverty and income inequality increased in Latin America during the 1980s. Forty-six percent of the increase in poverty took place in the cities of Brazil alone, though part of this reflects the migration of poor rural inhabitants to urban areas. There is strong evidence that both income inequality and poverty mirrored the economic cycle, rising during recession and falling during recovery. Economies that grew (e.g. Colombia, Costa Rica) performed better with respect to poverty and income inequality than those that stagnated. In particular, countries that failed to stabilize effectively (e.g. Brazil, Peru) experienced substantial increases in poverty. Educational attainment has the greatest correlation with both income inequality and the probability of being poor. From a policy standpoint, there is a clear association between the provision of education, lessening of income inequality, and poverty reduction.

Notes: Health problems and physical and mental impairments can restrict the kind and amount of work that individuals can perform. Several studies have estimated the loss in earnings experienced by disabled/health-limited workers, but they do not examine the trend in this loss over time. The authors propose an alternative indicator of productivity loss that is more appropriate for inter temporal comparisons: “lost earnings capability”–the difference between the amount of money persons could potentially earn if they were free of disability/health limitations and the amount of money that they can actually earn given their limitations. The estimates indicate that the mean lost earnings capability per disabled/health-limited person grew over the period from 1973 to 1988, while the population with disabilities/health limitations fell. In 1973, lost earnings capacity totaled about 5.3 percent of Gross National Product (GNP); by 1988, the loss had fallen to about 4.5 percent of GNP as a consequence of the reduction in the number of people with limitations. Data are from the Current Population Surveys and the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Notes: Review Article on Industrial Efficiency in Six Nations

Notes: From 1980 to 1990 Portugal experienced a generalized liberalization of economic activity, due in large part to its 1986 integration in the European Union. This paper studies the changes in the Portuguese distribution of household income and expenditure during this period, using micro-data on household budgets and applying recent developments in statistical inference for Lorenz curves. We find a significant increase in six measures of welfare and an unambiguous decrease in the inequality of the respective distributions. Different explanations for the findings of decreased inequality are discussed.

Notes: Richard Burkhauser and Dallas Salisbury (Eds.), Pensions in a Changing EconomyJohn Williamson and Fred Pampel, Old Age in Comparative Perspective

Notes: The calculation of purchasing power parities and quantity comparisons for a given year provides interesting information about the relative importance of countries. However, it is necessary to make these estimates annually in order to enable users to apply these parities for international comparison of annual data expressed in national currency. The paper deals with the problems related to merging spatial comparisons and temporal volume and price movements for the countries of the European Community. For these countries full information was collected in 1975 and in 1980, whereas in the intermediate years some price data were collected and price indices at a detailed level have also been collected. First the theoretical problems of consistency between the spatial results and temporal indices are discussed. Because no immediate consistency can be obtained, several methods are proposed to achieve consistency, by estimating one unique set of spatial and temporal indices. The available information for the period 1975-80 has been used in order to test the numerical differences between two sets of parities and price indices over time. Besides theoretical reasons for inconsistency, it is also necessary to take into account errors in the price observations or in the price indices. The results presented in the paper should be considered as provisional and further work will be undertaken to obtain better insights into the inconsistency between these sets of data.

Notes: To know the size and development of the hidden or underground economy is important for policy making, mainly because the measures undertaken may be misdirected if they are based on biased official statistics. The hidden economy can be measured by considering indicators. The direct methods are based on voluntary surveys and on tax auditing and other compliance methods. The indirect estimation methods rely on the identification of residuals with respect to income and expenditures, as well as in the labor and money markets. The strengths and weaknesses of each of these measurement approaches are discussed and the resulting estimates of the size of the hidden economy are compared. A different approach to measurement is to look at the determinants leading to the existence and growth of the hidden economy. Finally, the method of “unobserved variables” allows the combination of the two approaches by simultaneously considering the determinants and indicators of the under- ground economy. The results show a considerable range of sizes for a given country and year. Though there is a broad range of size estimates, there is general agreement that the hidden economy's size has been growing for all countries over recent decades. Further progress in quantitative knowledge about the hidden economy requires the development of a theoretical model which analyses the interdependencies between the official private sector, the hidden economy, and the public sector.

Notes: In the course of the nearly two decades since the revised SNA was developed, the role of pensions and insurance in the developed western economies has been significantly altered. The United Nations System of National Accounts (SNA) is not fully consistent in its treatment of pension and insurance transactions. This paper examines whether, in view of the changed institutional context, a modification of the SNA treatment of this complex of flows would be desirable. It investigates the impact on household income and saving of adopting a somewhat more consistent transactor/transaction approach for all pension and insurance transactions. Four main topics are covered: (1) social security, (2) private pensions, (3) life insurance, and (4) casualty insurance. Each is considered in terms of the treatment of contributions, the treatment of benefits, and the handling of reserves and the income generated by them. The same sorts of problem arise in all four cases.

Notes: Production maximization, together with an appropriate distribution of income and wealth, can no longer be considered as the exclusive objective of socio-economic policies. Economic and social life is accompanied by numerous hardships, constraints and damages which demand to be minimized. Combining these dual aims is not easy as no single model has yet been set up taking into account all these inter-relations. However, one may try to reduce the uncertainty about the statistical material that could be required for decision-making in this new context.

Notes: For estimates of the wealth distribution Canada depends on household surveys taken at 6–7 year intervals. The latest data from this source refer to household balance sheets in the spring of 1977. A comparison with 1970 shows that there is little change in the composition of wealth held by households but that inequality of the wealth distribution has been somewhat reduced. Wealth data by age of family head is presented in order to describe more fully the wealth distribution and composition in Canada.Weaknesses in the data are discussed as well as the difficulties of making appropriate adjustments to the data at the micro record level. For policy evaluation and formulation purposes the lack of comprehensive estimates inclusive of pension wealth as well as the small sample size (12,700 usable records) have been perceived as greater obstacles to utilizing the data than the underestimate in aggregate assets and debts which affects more the higher than the middle and lower ranges of the wealth distribution.

Notes: The article refutes the contention that Brazil's development has not benefited the poor and that rapid growth has had a polarizing effect on the distribution of income. It uses the National Household Expenditure Survey of 1974–75 to try to quantify the extent of poverty and concludes that the incòme levels of the poor have been underestimated in the past. The evidence suggests also that occupational and regional variables are powerful determinants of income stratification. Wage rate statistics convey information about long-term trends in income. The article notes considerable increases in rural wages during the 1970s as well as wage improvements in the urban informal sector. Shifts in the structure of employment have probably been the most powerful cause of economic improvement in Brazil. The enormous absorption of rural-urban migrants occurred without a flooding of the lower income urban categories. Social indicators and statistics referring to ownership of household durable consumer goods corroborate income and labor market evidence to the effect that there has been considerable progress for the poor during the 1970s. The article reviews statistical evidence bearing on distribution. There is little doubt that the distribution of income in Brazil is very skewed. It is not possible, however, to come to conclusions about changes that might have occurred in the degree of inequality over time. Finally, the article includes data on the “distribution of education” and the “distribution of life expectancy” and notes improvement over time in both.This article takes advantage of the Brazilian population census of 1980 to bring up to date some of the statistical material that bears on the issues of poverty and income distribution. First, the article describes the overall context of Brazilian development since 1960. The second part analyzes the extent of poverty in the mid-1970s. The third part deals with trends in wages, employment and selected welfare indicators. The last section briefly summarizes the information relating to income distribution: what is the extent of skewedness and how has it evolved over time?

Notes: Income redistribution studies on the macro–economic level have been undertaken in Denmark for the years 1938–39, 1949, 1955, and 1963. By use of national accounts figures and all other available statistics, it was on certain assumptions possible to distribute public sector income and expenditure by income groups.A quite different approach is used in a Danish redistribution study on the micro-economic level for 1971, which relies solely on the comprehensive data from the family budget survey for that year. Unfortunately this study only relates to employee households.This paper deals with the 1963 and 1971 studies. First it describes and discusses the differences in methodology between the two studies and indicates some ideas for future studies in this field in Denmark. In the following sections some main results of the two studies are given, briefly for the 1963 study and more comprehensively for the 1971 study. The studies show the great and growing strength of the policy of redistribution through public sector income and expenditure in Denmark.It is the opinion of the authors that the appearance of redistribution studies based on comprehensive family budget surveys makes for a substantial improvement of redistribution figures, and that the purely micro-level frame of reference makes it possible to interpret the results in a more satisfactory way than before. Furthermore, the appearance of detailed input-output based national accounts data should bring about further improvements in redistribution figures through better data on indirect taxes and subsidies as well as supporting data which are necessary to link the micro and macro levels in a consistent way.

Notes: It is often discussed that inflation introduces a substantial, arbitrary and regressive redistribution of income and wealth under even mild inflation. But after a quarter century of experience with inflation in postwar Japan, very little is known about these costs of inflation on an empirical basis. Due to the complexity of the evaluation of the redistributional impact on Japan, the present paper analyzes the effects of inflation on individuals or groups as wage earners, debtors and creditors, taxpayers, and holders of real estate.The main results of the present investigation suggest that the Japanese inflation for 1955–75 did not seem to introduce much inequality in the income (flow) account in the economy, but that the inequality between households has appeared more in the wealth (stock) account, especially between the house-owner groups and non-house-owner groups. These observations are mainly derived from the following investigations; (i) the wage lag hypothesis about inflation, even if not wrong, does not seem acceptable when applied to the entire period (1955–75) as well as to each of the five sub-periods; (ii) there has been a substantial transfer of real purchasing power from households to non-financial corporations, and, to a lesser extent, to government entities in the debtor-creditor redistribution; (iii) among households, the most substantial redistribution takes place from the non-houseowners to houseowners with land, because of the huge amount of capital gains from the rapid increase in the price of real estate relative to the prices of other assets or the consumer price index, except for the last three years of rampaging inflation.

Notes: Preliminary estimates of the total incomes system of accounts (TISA) are provided for 1959 and 1969. They extend conventional accounts to include all consumption services produced by government and households as well as by enterprises, but define household purchases of durable and semi-durable goods as investment. Acquisitions of capital throughout the economy, intangible as well as tangible, and not only in the business sector, are included in capital accumulation along with, for tangible capital, net revaluations, that is capital gains net of increases in the general price level. Imputations are offered for non market consumption and capital accumulation, most prominently in unpaid household work and education. Much of government output, particularly police services and defense, is recalculated as intermediate, along with expenses related to work, while media services, treated by the United States Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) as business purchases of intermediate product, enter into TISA consumption. Subsidies are included in the value of product, as are services of volunteers and imputations for the underpayment of military conscripts and of jurors. Separate accounts are offered for the national income and product, business, nonprofit institutions, government enterprises, government and households.The ratios of BEA to TISA Net National Product were 81.4 percent and 76.5 percent in 1959 and 1969, respectively. BEA national income was 74.1 percent of the corresponding TISA net national income in 1959 and 69.6 percent in 1969, reflecting a greater per annum rate of growth of TISA net national income, 7.49 percent, as against 6.82 percent for the corresponding BEA national income.BEA gross private domestic investment, restricted to business acquisitions of tangible capital at original cost, was estimated as only approximately 22 percent of comprehensive TISA gross domestic capital formation in 1959 and some 20 percent in 1969. The BEA net private domestic investment growth rate of 7.32 percent per annum from 1959 to 1969 may be compared with a TISA net domestic capital formation growth rate of 9.42 percent.

Notes: Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, I study the sensitivity of cross-national income poverty comparisons to the method in which poverty is measured. Absolute poverty comparisons that keep the purchasing power at the poverty line constant across countries lead to conclusions that differ from relative poverty comparisons in which the real value of the poverty line varies with average income. The absolute poverty ranking of countries also varies as the real value of the poverty line is lowered. Cross-national differences in household characteristics are largely irrelevant in explaining poverty differences.

Notes: Using longitudinal data which include real estate wealth, financial assets as well as consumer durables, changes in the distribution of wealth in Sweden are related to major changes in asset prices and in incentives to hold various assets in the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Our analysis of the mobility of wealth indicates that decile mobility is higher in Sweden than in the U.S., while the analysis of who is gaining and who is loosing shows results similar to those of previous studies.

Notes: We demonstrate that the criteria put forward by Atkinson and Bourguignon (1987) can be satisfactorily applied to the analysis of poverty even when the demographic composition of society and the definition of poverty change over time. We show that they provide both sufficient and necessary conditions for any robust conclusions concerning the changes in welfare and poverty. We apply these criteria to a set of data tracking annual income distribution movements in France from 1977 to 1994. The Atkinson and Bourguignon criteria posit that recent changes in poverty are a function of macroeconomic fluctuations in activity.

Notes: This study focuses on the role of foreign-born households in Canada's asset market. An empirical analysis of wealth accumulation is conducted for a large sample of Canadian households circa 1977–84. This study period reflects a change in Canada's immigration policy which resulted in immigration Rows switching from Europe to Asia. A life-cycle framework is used to examine wealth accumulation behaviour of the foreign-born vis-à-vis Canadian-born households. The empirical results confirm the existence of an inverted ‘U’-shaped wealth-age profile for both Canadian and immigrant households. However, the 1977 results show that the rate of wealth accumulation is higher for the immigrant household than the Canadian-born household in pre-retirement years, while the 1984 results reveal the opposite. After retirement, the rate of wealth dissipation is slower for Canadians than for foreign-born households. Only the 1984 results indicate that public social security wealth displaces household savings for both the Canadian-born and the foreign-born by a small amount. Finally, an immigrant household exhibits a stronger transfer motive within a family than a Canadian-born household regardless of year tested.

Notes: This paper investigates the importance of increases in the productivity of producing capital in estimates of the profit rate decline which occurred in the United States during the period 1950–90. We find that, when profit rate measures take into account the increasing productivity of producing capital stock (as measured by the embodied labor required to produce it), the observed decline is about one-half that found using conventional measures of profit. This finding has important implications for interest rate and investment policies.

Notes: This paper outlines a conceptual basis for the measurement and analysis of levels of welfare. It reflects the thinking that has been ongoing in the World Bank's Living Standards Measurement Study. Three alternative approaches to the measurement of welfare for the purpose of ranking households are surveyed, and the data requirements and analytical techniques for each highlighted. Various issues are discussed regarding the causal analysis of welfare levels and the changes in them. It is argued that the consideration of several dynamic aspects of welfare is significant for the identification of the poor and the potentially poor and for more accurate measurement of levels of living between socioeconomic groups.

Notes: At the first residential conference of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which was held at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, in September 1983, Mr Stewart Bates, QC, spoke on the implications of the decision of the House of Lords in the case of W. T. Ramsay Ltd v CIR. A report of those proceedings was held over until the decision of the House of Lords in the case of Furniss, v Dawson was known. The following report is based upon Mr Bates' address and the comments of Mr Stephen Oliver, QC, Mr John Avery Jones and Mr Adrian Shipwright who spoke at a lunchtime seminar convened by the IFS on 9 March 1984 to consider the decision in Furniss v Dawson. This report does not reflect the opinions of the IFS, which has no corporate views.

Notes: This paper discusses, and measures the quantitative impact of, a number of conceptual issues relating to the household saving rate data in the National Accounts of Japan. It finds that Japan's seemingly high household saving rate is biased due to the exclusion of capital transfers and real capital gains, the valuation of depreciation at historical cost rather than at replacement cost, the use of a residual measure of financial saving rather than Flow of Funds Accounts data thereon, and the treatment of expenditures on consumer durables as consumption rather than as saving, but that the biases are to a considerable extent mutually offsetting. It also finds that the Japan-U.S. gap in household (personal) saving rates is due largely to conceptual differences and deficiencies and that household saving in Japan consists primarily of financial saving (net lending), meaning that most of it is available to finance investment in other sectors of the economy and/or abroad.

Notes: The paper argues for the use of scanner data from EPOS systems for use in the compilation of consumer price indices. A number of methods of calculating micro-indices from such data are outlined. Scanner data for colour television sets in the U.K. are used as an example. The Tornqvist chained index is used as a benchmark against which alternative formulations, including those based on representative products, can be judged, the errors often being substantial. The paper argues for the use of scanner data, illustrates methods of compiling micro-indices and points to the potential for serious errors from conventional methods.