Search results for "competition."
showing 10 items of 1367 documents
The Impact of the Productivity Dispersion Across Employers on the Labor's Income Share
2016
In the present paper, I study the distribution of income across the factors of production within the canonical on-the-job search framework. I show that, by weakening the competition between employers, a mean-preserving spread of the employers' productivity distribution decreases the share of the production output that the workers receive. This result is particularly intriguing in light of the rising productivity dispersion and the declining labor share in many countries.
Variation and change in English resultative constructions
2010
AbstractThe system of English resultative constructions is in a state of flux characterized by variation between two of its most prominent competitors,way-constructions as inShe worked herwayto the topand reflexive structures as inShe worked herselfto the top.Although this competition has occasionally been addressed in the literature (cf. Jackendoff, 1990:213; Kirchner, 1951:158; Salkoff, 1988:54ff.), the present findings reveal that the long-standing rivalry between these structures has resulted in an increased use of theway-construction at the expense of reflexive structures. In addition, the coexistence ofway-constructions with semantically overlapping reflexive structures eventually cul…
University Mergers in Finland: Mediating Global Competition
2014
University mergers have become a common strategy for increasing global competitiveness. In this chapter, the authors analyze the implementation of mergers in Finnish universities from the perspective of social justice as conceived within Finland and other Nordic countries.
Market Must Be Defended: The Role of Counter-Espionage Policy in Maximizing Domestic Market Welfare
2020
Countering economic espionage is becoming one of the priorities of the governments of advanced economies. The present paper takes a step forward in the theoretical analysis of the interaction between economic espionage and counter-espionage by focusing on the case of a market opened to international trade. This analysis represents a first approximation to an inquiry into the rationale for the influence of the market level of competition on the dynamics of such interaction. The results suggest that this influence is complex in the case of the effort exerted in economic espionage and the characteristics of market demand play an important role in it. In the case of the counter-espionage policy…
R&D Competition, Cooperation, and Microeconomic Policies
2016
This chapter aims to contribute to the better understanding of R&D by scholars and practitioners. It includes a first section where the concept of innovation is defined and its public good nature and cumulative dimension are analysed. Next, the incentives that firms have to undertake R&D to attain a competitive edge upon rivals are considered. This entails the consideration of both ex ante and ex post incentives to undertake R&D. Since innovation is costly and derives important external effects, cooperation in R&D activities is prominent in several industries where firms enter into research joint ventures, or form research networks. The effect of cooperation is that, under s…
Empirical Evidence on the Relationship between Mobile Termination Rates and Firms' Profits
2015
The theoretical literature on mobile termination rates (MTRs) is inconclusive on how the level of MTRs affects overall consumer charges and firms' profits. We show that when firms offer bundles with fixed included usage – a tariff structure that has become more common in recent years – an identical change in all MTRs does not affect firms' retail prices or profits. We use a panel dataset from saturated European markets to estimate the effect of MTRs on mobile operators' profits. As predicted by the theoretical model, we cannot reject the fact that firms' profits are unaffected by an identical change in all MTRs.
Contests with size effects
2006
In this paper we analyze the structure of contest equilibria with a variable number of individuals. First we analyze a situation where the total prize depends on the number of agents and where every single agent faces opportunity costs of investing in the contest. Second we analyze a situation where the agents face a trade-off between productive and appropriative investments. Here, the number of agents may also influence the productivity of productive investments. It turns out that both types of contests may lead to opposing results concerning the optimal number of individuals depending on the strength of size effects. Whereas in the former case individual utility is u-shaped when the numbe…
BASIC RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IN VERTICAL MARKETS*
2012
This paper considers the role of basic research and development (R&D) investment in vertical markets in which an incumbent owner of a basic technological input faces potential competition. We identify the conditions under which the socially optimal investment in basic research involves entry by new firms. Our main insight is that there is a role for public investment in R&D that appears to have been overlooked in the existing literature. This role draws on the idea that basic R&D adds to the credibility of the threat of the potential development of alternative technologies by reducing their implementation costs.
Spatial Competition in Quality
2011
We develop a model of vertical innovation in which firms incur a market entry cost and position themselves in the quality space. Once established, firms compete monopolistically, selling to consumers with heterogeneous tastes for quality. We establish the general existence and conditional uniqueness of the pricing game in such vertically differentiated markets with a potentially large number of active firms. Turning to firms’ entry decisions, exogenously growing productivities induce firms to enter the market sequentially at the top end of the quality spectrum. We spell out the conditions under which the entry problem is replicated over time so that each new entrant improves incumbent quali…
EXPLANATORY FACTORS OF MARKET POWER IN THE BANKING SYSTEM
2007
The aim of the study is to analyse the explanatory factors of market power in the banking system. Using as laboratory the Spanish banking system in the period 1986–2002, results show an increase of market power from the mid-1990s. Of the set of variables that the model posits as explaining market power, those with the greatest explanatory power are size, efficiency and specialization; concentration is not significant. This last result shows the limitations of the approaches, studies and decision-making rules of economic policy that uses market concentration as a proxy for the degree of competition.