Search results for "MICROECONOMICS"

Welfare, Home Market Effects, and Horizontal Foreign Direct Investment

2005

We investigate the spatial distribution and organization of an imperfectly competitive industry when firms may choose to operate more than a single production unit. Focusing on a short-run setting with a fixed mass of firms, we fully characterize the spatial equilibria analytically. Comparing the equilibrium and the first-best, we show that both organizational and spatial inefficiencies may arise. In particular, when fixed costs are low enough the market outcome may well lead to overinvestment and, therefore, to too many multinationals operating from a social point of view. Furthermore, once multinationals are taken into account, the market outcome may well lead too little agglomeration.

Estimating the substitutability between private and public consumption: the case of Spain, 1960–2003

2005

This paper examines the relationship between private and public consumption using Spanish data over the period 1960–2003, using a two-good permanent-income model. We extend previous analysis addressing the question of whether this relationship is stable over time, or exhibits a structural break allowing the instability to occur at an unknown point in time. Our empirical results indicated the existence of a long-run relationship between private and public consumption. We also detect a structural change of regime shift in the cointegration regression around the time of 1973–74. Finally, the estimated intratemporal and intertemporal elasticities of substitution between the two types of expendi…

Incentive Schemes, Private Information and the Double-Edged Role of Competition for Agents

2013

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents, who have private information on their productivity. Two vertically differentiated firms compete for agents by offering contracts with fixed and variable payments. The superior firm employs both agent types in equilibrium, but the competitive pressure exerted by the inferior firm has a strong impact on contract design: For high degrees of vertical differentiation, i.e. low competition, low-ability agents are under-incentivized and exert too little effort. For high degrees of competition, high-ability agents are over-incentivized…

Stackelberg Equilibrium with Many Leaders and Followers. The Case of Setup Costs

2016

I provide conditions that guarantee that a Stackelberg game with a setup cost and an integer number of leaders and followers has an equilibrium in pure strategies. The main feature of the game is that when the marginal follower leaves the market the price jumps up, so that a leader’s payoff is neither continuous nor quasiconcave. To show existence I check that a leader’s value function satisfies the following single crossing condition: When the other leaders produce more the leader never accommodates entry of more followers. If demand is strictly logconcave, and if marginal costs are both non decreasing and not flatter than average costs, then a Stackelberg equilibrium exists. Besides showi…

A Fuzzy Chance-constraint Programming Model for a Home Health Care Routing Problem with Fuzzy Demand

2017

Incentive Properties of Residual Income when There is an Option to Wait

2005

Performance measures based on residual income are increasingly popular. The academic literature shows that residual income has important incentive properties when management bases investment decisions on the net present value (NPV) rule. My analysis focuses on the case in which investment decisions can be postponed, when management must extend the simple NPV rule by considering an option value. My analysis shows that some important incentive properties of residual income still hold when there is an option to wait, but only when the residual income measure is correctly adjusted. I also provide an incentive-based explanation of why the capital charge rate within firms is often significantly h…

Sharing R&D investments in breakthrough technologies to control climate change

2017

This paper examines international cooperation on technological development as an alternative to international cooperation on GHG emission reductions. In order to analyze the scope of cooperation, a three-stage technology agreement formation game is solved. First, countries decide whether or not to sign up to the agreement. Then, in the second stage, the signatories (playing together) and the non-signatories (playing individually) select their investment in R&D. In this stage, it is assumed that the signatories not only coordinate their levels of R&D investment but also pool their R&D efforts to fully internalize the spillovers of their investment in innovation. Finally, in the third stage, …

Choosing Optimal Seed Nodes in Competitive Contagion.

2019

International audience; In recent years there has been a growing interest in simulating competitive markets to find out the efficient ways to advertise a product or spread an ideology. Along this line, we consider a binary competitive contagion process where two infections, A and B, interact with each other and diffuse simultaneously in a network. We investigate which is the best centrality measure to find out the seed nodes a company should adopt in the presence of rivals so that it can maximize its influence. These nodes can be used as the initial spreaders or advertisers by firms when two firms compete with each other. Each node is assigned a price tag to become an initial advertiser whi…

The Strategic Use of Innovation to Influence Environmental Policy: Taxes versus Standards

2015

Abstract This paper evaluates the strategic behavior of a polluting monopolist to influence environmental policy, either with taxes or with standards, comparing two alternative policy games. The first of the games assumes that the regulator commits to an ex-ante level of the policy instrument. The second one is the time-consistent policy game. We find that the strategic behavior of the firm is welfare improving and leads to more environmental innovation than under regulatory commitment if a tax is used to control pollution. However, the contrary occurs if an emission standard is used. Under commitment, it is shown that both policy instruments are equivalent. We conclude that the optimal env…

Pathways of Innovation: The I-District Effect Revisited

2018

The I-district effect establishes the existence of dynamic efficiency in Marshallian industrial districts in the form of a positive innovative differential comparing to the average of the economy. The hypothesis has been empirically validated for the case of technological innovation using patent indicators. Empirical research has assumed that all types of patentable figures (utility models, national patents, EPO, WIPO) have the same weight regardless of its actual or expected market value, which may be questionable given the differences in coverage, protection and cost of each figure. In this article, we question the existence of the I-district effect when each patent is weighted by its exp…