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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...
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作者：Galasso, Alberto; Schankerman, Mark
作者单位：University of Toronto; University of London; London School Economics & Political Science
摘要：We study how fragmentation of patent rights and the formation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) affected the duration of patent disputes, and thus the speed of technology diffusion through licensing. We develop a model of patent litigation which predicts faster settlement when patent rights are fragmented and when there is less uncertainty about court outcomes, as was associated with the pro-patent shift of the CAFC. We confirm these predictions empirically using a data se...
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作者：Drugov, Mikhail
作者单位：Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
摘要：This article studies how delay in contracting depends on an exogenous signal. The agent whose cost is his private information may produce in the first period or be delayed until the second period. A signal about the cost of the agent is available between the two periods. The quality of the good can vary; in the benchmark case of no signal, the principal offers the standard Baron-Myerson contract and there is no delay. Delay is determined by the considerations at the margin and may increase or ...
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作者：Inderst, Roman; Shaffer, Greg
作者单位：Goethe University Frankfurt; University of Rochester; University of East Anglia; Imperial College London
摘要：This article investigates how the use of contracts that condition discounts on the share a supplier receives of a retailer's total purchases (market-share contracts) may affect market outcomes. The case of a dominant supplier that distributes its product through retailers that also sell substitute products is considered. It is found that when the supplier's contracts can only depend on how much a retailer purchases of its product (own-supplier contracts), intra- and interbrand competition cann...
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作者：Forbes, Silke J.; Lederman, Mara
作者单位：University of California System; University of California San Diego; University of Toronto
摘要：We investigate the effects of vertical integration on operational performance. Large U.S. airlines use regional partners to operate some of their flights. Regionals may be owned or governed through contracts. We estimate whether an airline's use of an owned, rather than independent, regional at an airport affects delays and cancellations on the airline's own flights out of that airport. We find that integrated airlines perform systematically better than nonintegrated airlines at the same airpo...
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作者：Stepanov, Sergey
作者单位：New Economic School
摘要：Facilitating access to courts for outside shareholders is often viewed as a remedy against managerial opportunism. My model shows that, when courts are biased toward managers, reducing the barriers to shareholder suits can lower efficiency because it can lead to either excessive litigation or excessive monitoring of managers by shareholders. The latter effect implies that easy shareholder litigation may lead to a greater use of substitute mechanisms of corporate governance rather than more rel...
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作者：Khalil, Fahad; Lawarree, Jacques; Yun, Sungho
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle; Hanyang University
摘要：Both bribery and extortion weaken the power of incentives, but there is a trade-off in fighting the two because rewards to prevent supervisors from accepting bribes create incentives for extortion. Which is the worse evil? A fear of inducing extortion may make it optimal to tolerate bribery, but extortion is never allowed. Extortion discourages good behavior because the agent suffers from it even though he has done the right thing, whereas a bribe acts as a penalty for bad behavior. Our analys...
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作者：Asker, John; Cantillon, Estelle
作者单位：New York University; National Bureau of Economic Research; Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique - FNRS; Universite Libre de Bruxelles
摘要：A buyer seeks to procure a good characterized by its price and its quality from suppliers who have private information about their cost structure (fixed cost and marginal cost of providing quality). We characterize the buyer's optimal buying mechanism. We then use the optimal mechanism as a theoretical and numerical benchmark to study simpler buying procedures such as scoring auctions and bargaining. Scoring auctions can extract a significant proportion of the buyer's strategic surplus (the di...
