Home About us Contact
|
Home About us Contact | ||
|
|
||
Strategic Substitutes (strategic + substitute)
Selected AbstractsIncumbency and R&D Incentives: Licensing the Gale of Creative DestructionJOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY, Issue 4 2000Joshua S. Cans This paper analyzes the relationship between incumbency and R&D incentives in the context of a model of technological competition in which technologically successful entrants are able to license their innovation to (or be acquired by) an incumbent. That such a sale should take place is natural, since postinnovation monopoly profits are greater than the sum of duopoly profits. We identify three key findings about how innovative activity is shaped by licensing. First, since an incumbent's threat to engage in imitative R&D during negotiations increases its bargaining power, there is a purely strategic incentive for incumbents to develop an R&D capability. Second, incumbents research more intensively than entrants as long as (and only if) their willingness to pay for the innovation exceeds that of the entrant, a condition that depends critically on the expected licensing fee. Third, when the expected licensing fee is sufficiently low, the incumbent considers entrant R&D a strategic substitute for in-house research. This prediction about the market for ideas stands in contrast to predictions of strategic complementarity in patent races where licensing is not allowed. [source] Public Debt, Migration, and Shortsighted PoliticiansJOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMIC THEORY, Issue 5 2004Christian Schultz We analyze a model where local public debt levels are set by politicians who are chosen in local elections. Migration causes an externality across districts, and leads to overaccumulation of local public debt. Since debt is a strategic substitute, the median voters in each district prefer shortsighted political leaders who "borrow and spend," thereby exacerbating the problem of overaccumulation of local public debt. [source] TWO-SIDED MARKETS WITH PECUNIARY AND PARTICIPATION EXTERNALITIES,THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2009MARKUS REISINGER The existing literature on two-sided markets addresses participation externalities, but it has neglected pecuniary externalities between platforms. In this paper we build a model that incorporates both externalities. In our set-up, differentiated platforms compete in advertising levels and offer consumers a service free of charge that is financed through advertising. We show that advertising can exhibit the properties of a strategic substitute or complement. Surprisingly, we find that platform profits can increase with market entry and that there are cases in which the level of advertising rises with entry. We also consider endogenous entry and provide a welfare analysis. [source] Strategic managerial incentives under adverse selectionMANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 8 2005Michel Cavagnac We extend the strategic contract model where the owner designs incentive schemes for her manager before the latter takes output decisions. Firstly, we introduce private knowledge regarding costs within each owner,manager pair. Under adverse selection, we show that delegation involves a trade-off between strategic commitment and the cost of an extra informational rent linked to decentralization. Which policies will arise in equilibrium? We introduce in the game an initial stage where owners can simultaneously choose between control and delegation. We show that if decision variables are strategic substitutes, choosing output control through a quantity-lump sum transfer contract is a dominating strategy. If decision variables are strategic complements, this policy is a dominated strategy. Further, two types of dominant-strategies equilibrium may arise: in the first type, both principals use delegation; in the second one, both principals implement delegation for a low-cost manager and output control for a high-cost one. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Horizontal alliances and the merger paradoxMANAGERIAL AND DECISION ECONOMICS, Issue 4 2005James Sawler Mergers and alliances are two organizational forms which allow firms to combine complementary capabilities to realize strategic goals; they are, in many cases, strategic substitutes. Managerial decision-makers, therefore, require a framework for choosing between the two strategies. This paper contributes to this decision-making process by highlighting one advantage of alliances over mergers. Specifically, while the profitability of a cost-reducing horizontal merger is diminished by the resulting expansion of non-merging competitor(s), an alliance, where partners collaborate to reduce costs but sell their product independently, enables its partners to realize the benefits of merging but avoid the problem of strengthening competitors. A model is developed which demonstrates the profitability of establishing such an alliance compared to a merger. The implications of this strategy for antitrust review are briefly discussed. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source] Optimal Regulation of Cooperative R&D Under Incomplete InformationTHE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS, Issue 1 2004Isabelle Brocas A regulator offers a cooperation contract to two firms to develop a research project. The contract provides incentives to encourage skill-sharing and coordinate subsequent efforts. Innovators must get informational rents to disclose their privately known skills, which results in distorting R&D efforts with respect to the first-best level. When efforts are strategic complements, both efforts are distorted downwards. By contrast, when efforts are strategic substitutes, the effort of the firm with most valuable skills is distorted downwards (to decrease rents) and the effort of the other firm is distorted upwards (to compensate the previous efficiency loss). [source] Strategic Bidding By Potential Competitors: Will Monopoly Persist?THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMICS, Issue 2 2000Yongmin Chen Who will win the bidding to become the sole producer of a new product: the monopolist of a related product or a new entrant? When there exists potential entry to the monopolist's existing business, the standard result that monopoly persists (Gilbert and Newbery, ,Preemptive Patenting and the Persistence of Monopoly', American Economic Review, 72, pp. 514,526, 1982) may or may not hold, depending crucially on how the new product relates to the existing product of the monopolist. The monopolist tends to win the bidding and to dominate both products if the two products are strategic complements; and the entrant tends to win the bidding if the two products are strategic substitutes. [source] The Most-Favoured-Customer Pricing Policy and Competitive AdvantageBULLETIN OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Issue 3 2000Iñaki Aguirre The paper investigates the effects on competition of the unilateral most-favoured-customer pricing policy. A model is considered in which a multimarket incumbent firm faces a threat of entry in one of its two markets. It is shown that contemporaneous most-favoured-customer clauses may change competition to the advantage of the incumbent both under strategic substitutes and strategic complements. If the duopolistic market is strong, the most-favoured-customer policy makes the incumbent ,tough' and may be used for entry deterrence purposes. [source] Low-Price Low-Capacity Traps and Government Intervention in the Québec Hog MarketCANADIAN JOURNAL OF AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS, Issue 3 2004Bruno Larue This paper investigates the marketing of a primary commodity produced by competitive producers that sell to a single downstream processor. There is a significant lag between production and marketing decisions made by producers. If a credible price commitment cannot be made before producers make their output decision, it is a dominant strategy for the processor to buy producers' output at the world price adjusted for transportation costs. Producers fully anticipate this partial holdup ex ante and adjust production accordingly. When the processor's capacity is binding ex post, the equilibrium is described as a low-price, low-capacity trap. Under a specific condition, the processor finds it advantageous to credibly commit to a price increment before producers make their output decision. The ensuing equilibrium is Pareto-superior to the no-commitment equilibrium. We argue that the Québec hog/pork industry has experienced such a situation in the past few years. Government intervention is justified even if the processor has committed to a price increment. The modeling of strategic interactions between the government and the processor reveals that their price increments are strategic substitutes. However, given that the processor's (government's) payoff is increasing with the government's (processor's) price increment, the first-mover advantage entails committing early to a low-price increment to force one's rival to offer a high-price increment. Cet article analyse la mise en marché d'un produit primaire vendu par des producteurs preneurs de prix à un seul et unique transformateur. Les décisions de production et de mise en marché sont séparées dans le temps. Si le transformateur ne peut pas s'engager à payer un certain prix avant que les producteurs prennent leur décision de production, alors la stratégie dominante du transformateur est d'offrir aux producteurs le prix mondial diminué par les coûts de transport. Les producteurs anticipant ce hold-up partiel et réduisent leur production en conséquence. Lorsque le transformateur est confrontéà une contrainte de capacité ex post, les producteurs et le transformateur sont piégés dans un équilibre de « petit prix et petit volume ». Si une condition est respectée, il peut être avantageux pour le transformateur d'offrir un supplément aux producteurs avant leur décision de production. L'équilibre qui s'en suit constitue alors une amélioration au sens de Pareto. Nous soumettons que l'industrie porcine québécoise a vécu pareille expérience durant les dernières années. L'intervention du gouvernement demeure justifiée même si le transformateur s'est commis à payer un supplément. En fait, les interventions du transformateur et du gouvernement sont des substituts stratégiques. Puisque le gain du transformateur (gouvernement) croit avec le supplément offert par le gouvernement (transformateur), il y a un avantage àêtre le premier à se commettre à payer un faible supplément, tant pour le transformateur que pour le gouvernement, pour ainsi forcer l'autre partie à offrir un supplément plus généreux. [source] | ||||||||||