The Market Power of Technology

The Market Power of Technology PDF Author: Mordecai Kurz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change? Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences. Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.

The Market Power of Technology

The Market Power of Technology PDF Author: Mordecai Kurz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231556527
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since the 1980s, the United States has regressed to a level of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age in the late nineteenth century. At the same time, technological innovation has transformed society, and a core priority of public policy has been promoting innovation. What is the relationship between economic inequality and technological change? Mordecai Kurz develops a comprehensive integrated theory of the dynamics of market power and income inequality. He shows that technological innovations are not simply sources of growth and progress: they sow the seeds of market power. In a free market economy with intellectual property rights, firms’ control over technology enables them to expand, attain monopoly power, and earn exorbitant profits. Competition among innovators does not eliminate market power because technological competition is different from standard competition; it results in only one or two winners. Kurz provides a pioneering analysis grounded on quantifying technological market power and its effects on inequality, innovation, and economic growth. He outlines what causes market power to rise and fall and details its macroeconomic and distributional consequences. Kurz demonstrates that technological market power tends to rise, increasing inequality of income and wealth. Unchecked inequality threatens the foundations of democracy: public policy is the only counterbalancing force that can restrain corporate power, attain more egalitarian distribution of wealth, and make democracy compatible with capitalism. Presenting a new paradigm for understanding today’s vast inequalities, this book offers detailed proposals to redress them by restricting corporate mergers and acquisitions, reforming patent law, improving the balance of power in the labor market, increasing taxation, promoting upward mobility, and stabilizing the middle class.

Innovation Matters

Innovation Matters PDF Author: Richard J. Gilbert
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026235862X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A proposal for moving from price-centric to innovation-centric competition policy, reviewing theory and available evidence on economic incentives for innovation. Competition policy and antitrust enforcement have traditionally focused on prices rather than innovation. Economic theory shows the ways that price competition benefits consumers, and courts, antitrust agencies, and economists have developed tools for the quantitative evaluation of price impacts. Antitrust law does not preclude interventions to encourage innovation, but over time the interpretation of the laws has raised obstacles to enforcement policies for innovation. In this book, economist Richard Gilbert proposes a shift from price-centric to innovation-centric competition policy. Antitrust enforcement should be concerned with protecting incentives for innovation and preserving opportunities for dynamic, rather than static, competition. In a high-technology economy, Gilbert argues, innovation matters.

The Profit Paradox

The Profit Paradox PDF Author: Jan Eeckhout
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224293
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.

The Technology Trap

The Technology Trap PDF Author: Carl Benedikt Frey
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210799
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
From the Industrial Revolution to the age of artificial intelligence, Carl Benedikt Frey offers a sweeping account of the history of technological progress and how it has radically shifted the distribution of economic and political power among society's members. As the author shows, the Industrial Revolution created unprecedented wealth and prosperity over the long run, but the immediate consequences of mechanization were devastating for large swaths of the population.These trends broadly mirror those in our current age of automation. But, just as the Industrial Revolution eventually brought about extraordinary benefits for society, artificial intelligence systems have the potential to do the same. Benedikt Frey demonstrates that in the midst of another technological revolution, the lessons of the past can help us to more effectively face the present. --From publisher description.

Market Power Handbook

Market Power Handbook PDF Author: American Bar Association. Section of Antitrust Law
Publisher: American Bar Association
ISBN: 9781590315217
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
Have you ever wondered what a therapist really thinks? Have you ever wondered if a therapist truly cares about her patients? Have you tried to imagine the unimaginable, the loss of the person most dear to you? Is it true that `tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all? ` Love and loss are a ubiquitous part of life, bringing the greatest joys and the greatest heartaches. In one way or another all relationships end. People leave, move on, die. Loss is an ever-present part of life. In Love and Loss, Linda B. Sherby illustrates that in order to grow and thrive, we must learn to mourn, to move beyond the person we have lost while taking that person with us in our minds. Love, unlike loss, is not inevitable but, she argues, no satisfying life can be lived without deeply meaningful relationships. The focus of Love and Loss is how patients' and therapists' independent experiences of love and loss, as well as the love and loss that they experience in the treatment room, intermingle and interact. There are always two people in the consulting room, both of whom are involved in their own respective lives, as well as the mutually responsive relationship that exists between them. Love and loss in the life of one of the parties affects the other, whether that affect takes place on a conscious or unconscious level. Love and Loss is unique in two respects.The first is its focus on the analyst's current life situation and how that necessarily affects both the patient and the treatment. The second is Sherby's willingness to share the personal memoir of her own loss which she has interwoven with extensive clinical material to clearly illustrate the effect the analyst's current life circumstance has on the treatment. Writing as both a psychoanalyst and a widow, Linda B. Sherby makes it possible for the reader to gain an inside view of the emotional experience of being an analyst, making this book of interest to a wide audience. Professionals from psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and bereavement specialists through students in all the mental health fields to the public in general, will resonate and learn from this heartfelt and straightforward book.

Imperfect Markets and Imperfect Regulation

Imperfect Markets and Imperfect Regulation PDF Author: Thomas-Olivier Leautier
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262039281
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
The first textbook to present a comprehensive and detailed economic analysis of electricity markets, analyzing the tensions between microeconomics and political economy. The power industry is essential in our fight against climate change. This book is the first to examine in detail the microeconomics underlying power markets, stemming from peak-load pricing, by which prices are low when the installed generation capacity exceeds demand but can rise a hundred times higher when demand is equal to installed capacity. The outcome of peak-load pricing is often difficult to accept politically, and the book explores the tensions between microeconomics and political economy. Understanding peak-load pricing and its implications is essential for designing robust policies and making sound investment decisions. Thomas-Olivier Léautier presents the model in its simplest form, and introduces additional features as different issues are presented. The book covers all segments of electricity markets: electricity generation, under perfect and imperfect competition; retail competition and demand response; transmission pricing, transmission congestion management, and transmission constraints; and the current policy issues arising from the entry of renewables into the market and capacity mechanisms. Combining anecdotes and analysis of real situations with rigorous analytical modeling, each chapter analyzes one specific issue, first presenting findings in nontechnical terms accessible to policy practitioners and graduate students in management or public policy and then presenting a more mathematical analytical exposition for students and researchers specializing in the economics of electricity markets and for those who want to understand and apply the underlying models.

The Pursuit of Power

The Pursuit of Power PDF Author: William H. McNeill
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022616019X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
In this magnificent synthesis of military, technological, and social history, William H. McNeill explores a whole millennium of human upheaval and traces the path by which we have arrived at the frightening dilemmas that now confront us. McNeill moves with equal mastery from the crossbow—banned by the Church in 1139 as too lethal for Christians to use against one another—to the nuclear missile, from the sociological consequences of drill in the seventeenth century to the emergence of the military-industrial complex in the twentieth. His central argument is that a commercial transformation of world society in the eleventh century caused military activity to respond increasingly to market forces as well as to the commands of rulers. Only in our own time, suggests McNeill, are command economies replacing the market control of large-scale human effort. The Pursuit of Power does not solve the problems of the present, but its discoveries, hypotheses, and sheer breadth of learning do offer a perspective on our current fears and, as McNeill hopes, "a ground for wiser action."

Markets for Power

Markets for Power PDF Author: Paul L. Joskow
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN: 9780262600187
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This timely study evaluates four generic proposals for allowing free market forces toreplace government regulation in the electric power industry and concludes that none of thederegulation alternatives considered represents a panacea for the performance failures associatedwith things as they are now. It proposes a balanced program of regulatory reform and deregulationthat promises to improve industry performance in the short run, resolve uncertainties about thecosts and benefits of deregulation, and positions the industry for more extensive deregulation inthe long run should interim experimentation with deregulation, structural, and regulatory reformsmake it desirable.The book integrates modern microeconomic theory with a comprehensive analysis ofthe economic, technical, and institutional characteristics of modern electrical power systems. Itemphasizes that casual analogies to successful deregulation efforts in other sectors of the economyare an inadequate and potentially misleading basis for public policy in the electric power industry,which has economic and technical characteristics that are quite different from those in otherderegulated industries.Paul L. Joskow is Professor of Economics at MIT, author of ControllingHospital Costs (MIT Press 1981) and coauthor with Martin L. Baughman and Dilip P. Kamat of ElectricPower in the United States (MIT Press 1979). Richard Schmalensee, also at MIT, is Professor ofApplied Economics, author of The Economics of Advertising and The Control of Natural Monopolies, andeditor of The MIT Press Series, Regulation of Economic Activity.

Transient Market Power of Firms

Transient Market Power of Firms PDF Author: T.V.S. Ramamohan Rao
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527572714
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Every firm in the market for industrial products offers a distinct value to consumers. As such, they derive some market power based on the intrinsic value of their products. However, firms often utilize non-price strategies to reveal value to consumers because both the consumers and firms experience information asymmetry with respect to such value. They may also orient some strategies to increase their market share. In general, non-price strategies contain information about value beyond the market shares they achieve, and the shifts in market demand provide the firm with some transient market power. This book indicates that, given the transaction costs to the consumers, of switching between products, the increase in demand tends to be of a longer-term nature. It will not be eliminated over time, as is often conjectured. Measures of the intrinsic value of products, transient market power, and the changes in non-price strategies of firms that tend to perpetuate it are also defined and estimated in the text.

The Antitrust Paradox

The Antitrust Paradox PDF Author: Robert Bork
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781736089712
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description
The most important book on antitrust ever written. It shows how antitrust suits adversely affect the consumer by encouraging a costly form of protection for inefficient and uncompetitive small businesses.