Essays on Competition, Market Structures and Public Goods

Essays on Competition, Market Structures and Public Goods PDF Author: Kimon Theofanis Doulis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Public Goods, Mixed Goods, and Monopolistic Competition

Public Goods, Mixed Goods, and Monopolistic Competition PDF Author: Stephen Shmanske
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Public goods and monopolistic competition have traditionally been separate fields of study in microeconomics, each field having its own array of models. In this book, Stephen Shmanske builds a theoretical bridge between these two areas, suggesting that public goods and monopolistic competition are different dimensional simplifications of the same general model. The author argues first that the generic model for public goods has two dimensions of consumption but that public goods models have usually ignored or simplified the utilization dimension. Furthermore, private goods models in the monopolistic competition vein also have two implicit dimensions of consumption, but again, one of the dimensions is treated in a very constrained fashion. As it turns out, between public goods and monopolistic competition, each model emphasizes the dimension that is ignored or simplified in the other. Thus, the general, mixed goods model draws from both traditions, using the results of one model to generalize and extend the other. An immediate implication of the analysis is that the traditional models of public goods and monopolistic competition have focused on special cases and thus have provided misleading conclusions. Specifically, monopolistic competition and other models of differentiated oligopoly have reached conclusions in settings that emphasize uniform pricing despite the facts that (1) discriminatory pricing has been studied in competitive situations in public goods models, (2) discriminatory pricing is the more usual pricing method, and (3) the results obtained using uniform pricing do not generalize to more sophisticated pricing regimes. Meanwhile, public goods models have focused on special cases like national defense, where the results obtained do not generally apply in other public or mixed goods settings. Shmanske's conclusions have great relevance to policy formation on public goods provision. Public goods and mixed goods are not curious anomalies; they are all around us, and in most cases competitive private sector agents can and have been providing public goods with no market failure. Professionals and scholars in the areas of public finance and industrial organization will appreciate Shmanske's careful critique of existing models and his rigorous conceptualizing and modeling of public goods in private markets characterized by monopolistic competition.

Public Goods for Economic Development

Public Goods for Economic Development PDF Author: Olga Memedović
Publisher: UN
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
This publication addresses factors that promote or inhibit successful provision of the four key international public goods: financial stability, international trade regime, international diffusion of technological knowledge and global environment. Without these goods, developing countries are unable to compete, prosper or attract capital from abroad. The need for public goods provision is also recognized by the Millennium Development Goals, internationally agreed goals and targets for knowledge, health, governance and environmental public goods. The Report addresses the nature of required policies and institutions using the modern principles of collective action.

Essays on Market Structure and Competition

Essays on Market Structure and Competition PDF Author: Michalis Zaouras
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Who Gets What--and why

Who Gets What--and why PDF Author: Alvin E. Roth
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544291131
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
A Nobel laureate reveals the often surprising rules that govern a vast array of activities -- both mundane and life-changing -- in which money may play little or no role. If you've ever sought a job or hired someone, applied to college or guided your child into a good kindergarten, asked someone out on a date or been asked out, you've participated in a kind of market. Most of the study of economics deals with commodity markets, where the price of a good connects sellers and buyers. But what about other kinds of "goods," like a spot in the Yale freshman class or a position at Google? This is the territory of matching markets, where "sellers" and "buyers" must choose each other, and price isn't the only factor determining who gets what. Alvin E. Roth is one of the world's leading experts on matching markets. He has even designed several of them, including the exchange that places medical students in residencies and the system that increases the number of kidney transplants by better matching donors to patients. In Who Gets What -- And Why, Roth reveals the matching markets hidden around us and shows how to recognize a good match and make smarter, more confident decisions.

Essays on Quantitative Marketing and Economics

Essays on Quantitative Marketing and Economics PDF Author: Nan Chen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 127

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Book Description
In two essays, I present my work that applies empirical method to real-world problems in quantitative marketing and economics. In the first chapter, I use structural econometrics to investigate airlines' dynamic price competition. I show how widely-used dynamic pricing techniques affect firms profits under a competitive equilibrium. The second chapter is a joint work with Zemin Zhong. We focus on how China's anticorruption effort impact its economy, measured by car consumption and new business registration. Dynamic pricing is becoming a common practice in many industries, but its effect under competition is uncertain due to the potential for the Prisoner's dilemma. The paper studies profit and welfare implications of competitive dynamic pricing in the context of the airline industry. The paper develops a structural dynamic oligopoly model where firms compete in selling limited capacities when facing demand fluctuations. The supply and demand are jointly estimated using a unique daily-level data on airfares and capacity utilization. The identification leverages a natural experiment of carrier exit. The estimates show that air travel demand exhibits a large degree of temporal heterogeneity and stochastic variability. The counterfactuals show that the ability to perform dynamic pricing increases total welfare. In particular, (i) price discrimination (charging late-arriving consumers higher prices) softens competition in the late market and increases profits substantially and (ii) revenue management (pricing on remaining capacities) intensifies competition and does not increase profits. Corruption could either benefit economic growth by “greasing the wheel,” or distort supply of public goods and create inefficiency. Empirically testing the impact of corruption is difficult due to its evasive nature. We take an alternative approach by investigating the economic impacts of anti-corruption policies. We focus on China's recent anti-corruption campaign, the largest of its kind in recent history. As an important initiative of this campaign, the Communist Party's Provincial Committees of Discipline Inspection (PCDI) send inspector teams to investigate municipal governments for potential corruption. The variation in their timing allows us to use a difference-in-difference design to identify their impact on local economy. Using two unique administrative datasets of vehicle and business registration, we find that PCDI visits have a negative impact on both car sales and new business entry. For vehicles, the effect is surprisingly uniform across different price tiers: Luxury brands exhibit a similar drop as domestic brands, suggesting corruption's impact permeates households across a wide income spectrum. Over time, the effect is strengthening: We observe a 2\% drop in the first three months of PCDI visit and a 10\% drop one year afterward. The especially large impact cannot be explained by the decline in government officials' consumption behavior, suggesting anti-corruption efforts also affect the private sector. We test the idea using business registration data, and we found PCDI visits indeed discourage new business registration. We validate our empirical strategy by showing that (1) the timing of PCDI visits cannot be predicted by observable county characteristics and (2) car registrations exhibit parallel pre-treatment trends. Our results suggest there may be a trade-off in anti-corruption and economic growth.

The Economics of New Goods

The Economics of New Goods PDF Author: Timothy F. Bresnahan
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226074188
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
New goods are at the heart of economic progress. The eleven essays in this volume include historical treatments of new goods and their diffusion; practical exercises in measurement addressed to recent and ongoing innovations; and real-world methods of devising quantitative adjustments for quality change. The lead article in Part I contains a striking analysis of the history of light over two millenia. Other essays in Part I develop new price indexes for automobiles back to 1906; trace the role of the air conditioner in the development of the American south; and treat the germ theory of disease as an economic innovation. In Part II essays measure the economic impact of more recent innovations, including anti-ulcer drugs, new breakfast cereals, and computers. Part III explores methods and defects in the treatment of quality change in the official price data of the United States, Canada, and Japan. This pathbreaking volume will interest anyone who studies economic growth, productivity, and the American standard of living.

Foundations of Insurance Economics

Foundations of Insurance Economics PDF Author: Georges Dionne
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 0792392043
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
Economic and financial research on insurance markets has undergone dramatic growth since its infancy in the early 1960s. Our main objective in compiling this volume was to achieve a wider dissemination of key papers in this literature. Their significance is highlighted in the introduction, which surveys major areas in insurance economics. While it was not possible to provide comprehensive coverage of insurance economics in this book, these readings provide an essential foundation to those who desire to conduct research and teach in the field. In particular, we hope that this compilation and our introduction will be useful to graduate students and to researchers in economics, finance, and insurance. Our criteria for selecting articles included significance, representativeness, pedagogical value, and our desire to include theoretical and empirical work. While the focus of the applied papers is on property-liability insurance, they illustrate issues, concepts, and methods that are applicable in many areas of insurance. The S. S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School made this book possible by financing publication costs. We are grateful for this assistance and to J. David Cummins, Executive Director of the Foundation, for his efforts and helpful advice on the contents. We also wish to thank all of the authors and editors who provided permission to reprint articles and our respective institutions for technical and financial support.

Alternatives For Delivering Public Services

Alternatives For Delivering Public Services PDF Author: Emanuel S. Savas
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429726902
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
This book is the result of a program undertaken nine years ago by the Diebold Institute for Public Policy Studies, Inc., to identify and analyze potentials for private sector involvement in the delivery of public services. Since its founding in 1968, the Diebold Institute has focused on this question in the belief that private enterprise is capable of infusing public service delivery with the efficiency in resource allocation and management that is its hallmark, whether through direct involvement as a service provider or as a source of market dynamics and management techniques.

An Essay on Urban Economic Theory

An Essay on Urban Economic Theory PDF Author: Yorgos Y. Papageorgiou
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461549477
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Over the past thirty years, urban economic theory has been one of the most active areas of urban and regional economic research. Just as static general equilibrium theory is at the core of modern microeconomics, so is the topic of this book - the static allocation of resources within a city and between cities - at the core of urban economic theory. An Essay on Urban Economic Theory well reflects the state of the field. Part I provides an elegant, coherent, and rigorous presentation of several variants of the monocentric (city) model - as the centerpiece of urban economic theory - treating equilibrium, optimum, and comparative statistics. Part II explores less familiar and even some uncharted territory. The monocentric model looks at a single city in isolation, taking as given a central business district surrounded by residences. Part II, in contrast, makes the intra-urban location of residential and non-residential activity the outcome of the fundamental tradeoff between the propensity to interact and the aversion to crowding; the resulting pattern of agglomeration may be polycentric. Part II also develops models of an urbanized economy with trade between specialized cities and examines how the market-determined size distribution of cities differs from the optimum. This book launches a new series, Advances in Urban and Regional Economics. The series aims to provide an outlet for longer scholarly works dealing with topics in urban and regional economics.