Search results for "Monopolistic competition"
showing 10 items of 21 documents
Agglomeration without trade: how non-traded goods shape the space-economy
2004
Abstract We develop a spatial general equilibrium model in which the absence of interregional trade is an endogenous outcome. Extending the model developed by Ottaviano, Tabuchi, and Thisse (Int. Econ. Rev. 43 (2002) 409), we show that equilibria without trade differ significantly from those obtained in the presence of trade, which suggests that the presence of non-traded goods has a significant impact on spatial structures. Somewhat surprisingly, equilibrium structures without trade are richer than those with trade because partial agglomeration becomes a feasible outcome. Equilibria now depend on the ratio of mobile to immobile factors and an increase in that ratio triggers a process of sp…
R&D, Competition and Growth with Human Capital Accumulation Revisited
2012
In this paper, we have presented a generalization of Bucci's (2003) model in which have disentangled the monopolistic mark-up in the intermediate goods sector, the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization in order to have a better measurement of competition. Indeed, unlike Bucci (2003), in our model, the measure of competition is completely independent of the intermediate goods share in the final output and the returns to specialization. Our main finding is that, unlike Bucci (2003), we show that the competition does not play any role in growth. This result is explained by the complementarity of innovation and human capital assumed in the research produ…
Is the French mobile phone cartel really a cartel?
2009
International audience; France Telecom (FT), SFR and Bouygues Telecom (BT) have been fined by France's Conseil de la Concurrence (CC) for organizing a mobile phone cartel with stable market shares (one-half, one-third and one-sixth, respectively) and for directly exchanging commercial information. While not contesting the legal decision, it is argued here that the economic reasoning is flawed. (1) As the CC made much of the firms' stable market shares, we have first followed this line of reasoning by considering that the market shares are quotas under uniform costs. Even if there is a general incentive to form a monopolistic cartel, BT was too small for it to be worth its while to join it; it i…
On Capturing Oil Rents with a National Excise Tax Revisited
2004
In this paper the scope of Bergstrom’s (1982) results is studied. Moreover, his analysis is extended assuming that extraction cost is directly related to accumulated extractions. For the case of a competitive market it is found that the optimal policy is a constant tariff if extraction is costless. However, with depletion effects, the optimal tariff must ultimately be decreasing. For the case of a monopolistic market the results depend crucially on the kind of strategies the importing country governments can play and on whether the monopolist chooses the price or extraction rate. For a price-setting monopolist it is shown that the importing countries cannot use a tariff to capture monopoly …
The Institutionalists’ Reaction to Chamberlin’s 'Theory of Monopolistic Competition
2009
Edwin Chamberlin's The Theory of Monopolistic competition is often described as containing omportant traces of institutionalist influence. This is also confimred by Chamberlin himself who, repeadetly, referred to the work of Veblen, and John Maurice Clark among his inspirational sources. The aim of this paper is to analyse the institutionalist rection to the publication of the Theory of Monopolistic Competition. What will be argued is that the institutionalist response to Chamberlin was a mixed one, and involved some substantial criticisms of his analysis of market structures both on methodological and theoretical grounds. The paper is organized as follows. The first section presents a sket…
Unemployment, taxation and public expenditure in OECD economies
2008
Abstract This paper considers the financing of productive public goods and social benefits through different types of taxes in a model with unemployment. We incorporate unemployment, caused by the wage-setting behaviour of a monopolistic union, in a neoclassical growth model which integrates a quite detailed structure of taxes used to finance productive public expenditures and social transfers and parameterizes the inefficiency of government to transform taxes into public goods or transfers. The main conclusion is that the relationship between unemployment and labour taxes critically depends on the degree of government efficiency and the unions' perception on how taxes determine the welfare…
Monopolistic competition and different wage setting systems
2010
In this paper, we present a disequilibrium unemployment model without labor market frictions and monopolistic competition in the goods market within an infinite horizon model of growth. We consider different wage setting systems and compare wages, the unemployment rate, and income per capita in the long-run at firm, sector, and national (centralized) levels. The aim of this paper is to determine under which conditions, the inverted-U hypothesis between unemployment and the degree of centralization of wage bargaining, reported by Calmfors and Driffill [Economic Policy, 6, 14¿61, 1988], is confirmed. Our analysis shows that a high degree of market power normally produces the inverted-U shape …
An appraisal of Piero Sraffa's 'The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions'
2001
The paper proposes a new interpretation of Sraffa's 1926 Economic Journal article, ‘The Laws of Returns under Competitive Conditions’, according to which the latter derives from the same strategy of research which underlies its 1925 Italian precursor, ‘Sulle relazioni fra costo e quantità prodotta’. Sraffa tested the explanatory power of a Marshallian monopolistic partial equilibrium model and concluded that that model is able to treat one source of variable returns (firm-internal economies); but this articulation of Marshall‘s theory does not substantially improve on the trade-off between logical consistency and empirical relevance which afflicted the theory in its whole. © 2001, Taylor & …
Quality pricing-to-market
2014
We examine firm's pricing-to-market decisions in vertically differentiated industries featuring a large number of firms that compete monopolistically in the quality space. Firms sell goods of heterogeneous quality to consumers with non-homothetic preferences that differ in their income and thus their marginal willingness to pay for quality increments. We derive closed-form solutions for the pricing game under costly international trade, thus establishing existence and uniqueness. We then examine how the interaction of good quality and market demand for quality affects firms' pricing-to-market decisions. The relative price of high quality goods compared to that of low quality goods is an inc…
A reconsideration of the link between vertical externality and managerial incentives
2018
Previous research revealed that the strategic role of delegation contracts disappears if two quantity†setting firms outsource input production to a monopolistic supplier. I show that this role is restored if the assumption of a downstream duopoly is relaxed. Thus, delegation contracts allow downstream profit†maximizing owners to commit their firms to a behavior that differs from their preferences. This behavior varies nonmonotonically with the number of firms in the downstream market. Corresponding deviations from profit maximization are larger if the upstream monopolist makes a price precommitment. But little to no deviation occurs if the number of firms is large.