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作者：Dube, Jean-Pierre; Hitsch, Guenter J.; Rossi, Peter E.
作者单位：University of Chicago; National Bureau of Economic Research; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
摘要：For many consumer packaged goods products, researchers have documented inertia in brand choice, a form of persistence whereby consumers have a higher probability of choosing a product that they have purchased in the past. We show that the finding of inertia is robust to flexible controls for preference heterogeneity and not due to autocorrelated taste shocks. We explore three economic explanations for the observed structural state dependence: preference changes due to past purchases or consump...
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作者：Eso, Peter; Nocke, Volker; White, Lucy
作者单位：University of Oxford; Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; University of Mannheim; Harvard University
摘要：We model a downstream industry where firms compete to buy capacity in an upstream market which allocates capacity efficiently. Although downstream firms have symmetric production technologies, we show that industry structure is symmetric only if capacity is sufficiently scarce. Otherwise it is asymmetric, with one large, fat, capacity-hoarding firm and a fringe of smaller, lean, capacity-constrained firms. As demand varies, the industry switches between symmetric and asymmetric phases, generat...
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作者：Sandford, Jeremy A.
作者单位：University of Kentucky
摘要：What happens when type is endogenous in a reputational setting? Here, customers cannot tell experts from imitative quacks, but gain information through repeated interaction. Firm incentives to invest in expertise vary nonmonotonically in how tolerant customers are of bad outcomes; more tolerant customers are both more forgiving, making expertise less necessary, and longer tenured, increasing the value of retaining them. In equilibrium, the proportion of expert firms is bounded away from one; s...
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作者：Serrano, Carlos J.
作者单位：University of Toronto; National Bureau of Economic Research
摘要：This article explores new data on the transfer and renewal of U.S. patents and interprets this new evidence using a model of patent transfers and renewal. We find that the proportion of transferred patents is large and differs across technology fields and especially type of patentees. We also find that the probability of a patent being traded depends on a number of factors-the age of the patent, the number of citations received by a given age, the patent generality, and whether the patent has ...
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作者：Winter, Eyal
作者单位：Hebrew University of Jerusalem
摘要：This article studies the effect of transparency among peers on the principal's cost of providing incentives. Using directed graphs to represent peer information, we show that under complementarity the cost of providing incentives is decreasing with the level of transparency within the organization. We also investigate the role of the architecture of the information in boosting incentives. In arguing that substitution impedes the benefits of transparency, we will compare function-based teams wi...
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作者：Laux, Volker
作者单位：University of Texas System; University of Texas Austin
摘要：This article examines the costs and benefits of permitting executives to use inside information to time their stock option exercises. Whereas prior research has focused on the negative effects of timing discretion, I show that such discretion can have beneficial incentive effects in that it leads to improved project abandonment decisions. This result follows because at-the-money options used to induce managerial effort tilt the CEO's preferences toward project continuation. When the CEO is fre...
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作者：Bos, Iwan; Harrington, Joseph E., Jr.
作者单位：Maastricht University; Johns Hopkins University
摘要：In the context of an infinitely repeated capacity-constrained price game, we endogenize the composition of a cartel when firms are heterogeneous in their capacities. When firms are sufficiently patient, there exists a stable cartel involving the largest firms. A firm with sufficiently small capacity is not a member of any stable cartel. When a cartel is not all-inclusive, colluding firms set a price that serves as an umbrella with non-cartel members pricing below it and producing at capacity. ...
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作者：Chen, Yongmin; Pearcy, Jason
作者单位：University of Colorado System; University of Colorado Boulder; Zhejiang University; Montana State University System; Montana State University Bozeman
摘要：This article develops a theory of dynamic pricing in which firms may offer separate prices to different consumers based on their past purchases. Brand preferences over two periods are described by a copula admitting various degrees of positive dependence. When commitment to future prices is infeasible, each firm offers lower prices to its rival's customers. When firms can commit to future prices, consumer loyalty is rewarded if preference dependence is low, but enticing brand switching occurs ...
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作者：Doraszelski, Ulrich; Satterthwaite, Mark
作者单位：Harvard University; Northwestern University
摘要：We provide a general model of dynamic competition in an oligopolistic industry with investment, entry, and exit. To ensure that there exists a computationally tractable Markov-perfect equilibrium, we introduce firm heterogeneity in the form of randomly drawn, privately known scrap values and setup costs into the model. Our game of incomplete information always has an equilibrium in cutoff entry/exit strategies. In contrast, the existence of an equilibrium in the Ericson and Pakes' model of ind...
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作者：Davis, Lucas W.; Muehlegger, Erich
作者单位：University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Harvard University
摘要：This article measures the extent to which prices exceed marginal costs in the U.S. natural gas distribution market during the period 1991-2007. We find large departures from marginal cost pricing in all 50 states, with residential and commercial customers facing average markups of over 40%. Based on conservative estimates of the price elasticity of demand, these distortions impose hundreds of millions of dollars of annual welfare loss. Moreover, current price schedules are an important preexis...
