The Anticipated and Unanticipated Economic Effects of Persistent Plant Pathogens: The Case of Nematode Infestations in the U.S. Potato Industry

مطابق با بررسی ساختار بازار پسته در ایران، وجود مشکلاتی چند در این محصول موجب ایجاد قدرت انحصاری برخی شرکت ها در تعیین قیمت این محصول در بازارهای داخلی گشته است. این مسئله موجب انحراف از بهینة اجتماعی و ایجاد اثراتی در رفاه اقشار مختلف جامعه می گردد. لذا در مطالعة حاضر با استفاده از اطلاعات سال 1389، با هدف بررسی وجود یا عدم وجود انحصار در بازار پسته و سنجش اثرات رفاهی برقراری یا کاهش چنین انحصاری بر عرضه کنندگان و مصرف کنندگان پسته در ایران، مدل تعادل فضایی که مبنای آن حداکثرسازی خالص رفاه اجتماعی است، مورد استفاده قرار گرفت. مطابق با نتایج این تحقیق، ساختار بازار پسته در ایران به واقع با رقابت کامل فاصله داشته و ایجاد شرایط بازار رقابت کامل موجب افزایش تقریبا دو برابری در رفاه مصرف کنندگان و کاهش 13/0 درصدی در رفاه عرضه کنندگان این محصول می گردد. در مجموع تغییرات ساختار بازار داخلی پسته اثرات قابل‌توجهی بر مصرف کنندگان داخلی این محصول می گذارد ولی عرضه کنندگان این محصول به دلیل صادرات بخش اعظم پسته به کشورهای خارجی، کم‌تر تحت تأثیر قرار می گیرند. با توجه به نتایج این تحقیق پیشنهاد می شود با مهیا سازی شرایط لازم جهت ایجاد بازار رقابت کامل، نظیر راه اندازی بورس پسته، موجبات کاهش نوسان قیمت و در نتیجه حمایت از مصرف کنندگان داخلی محصول مذکور را نیز فرآهم آورد.

ANTITRUST AND INEQUALITY

ABSTRACTWith the advocacy on corporate social responsibility (CSR), it is common for firms to integrate profit objectives with social responsibilities, such as with an aim to boost consumer welfare. We focus on a socially responsible firm that is concerned with its profit as well as consumer surplus and examine four different types of pro‐social behavior by the firm: optimizing a weighted average of the expected profit and consumer surplus (referred to as the mixed‐objective model), negotiating with pro‐social executives (referred to as the Nash bargaining), charitable donations after profit maximization (referred to as the donation), and ensuring the portion of consumer surplus to be a given fraction of the social welfare (referred to as the fairness model). Our results show that under all behaviors, there is a more substantial boost to consumer surplus at the expense of a slight decrease in profit when consumer surplus consideration (referred to as the CSC level) is lower. Among those four behaviors, while maintaining the same profit level, a donation is not the most consumer‐surplus‐enhancing pro‐social behavior among those four behaviors, when the overhead cost is sufficiently high or when a high enough profit level needs to be maintained. This finding challenges Milton Friedman's advocacy that socially responsible businesses should indirectly fulfill their societal duties by first focusing on profit maximization and then redistributing the generated profit for social causes. Our results imply and quantify the managerial insight that in balancing consumer surplus against profit loss, a little commitment to consumers can go a long way. We also shed light on when the firm should choose a decentralized pro‐social behavior, such as donations, and when it should incorporate consumer surplus consideration into operational decisions for consumer surplus enhancement.

PRM51 - A NEW CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF THE COST-EFFECTIVENESS THRESHOLD

This study analyzes the demand for frozen fried potatoes in an important city of Argentina, Mar del Plata, and the effect of changes in market structure on consumer welfare. We found that high-income individuals are more concerned about health and nutrition, and that younger and lower-income consumers are more price-sensitive. The results suggest that consumer surplus would decrease with a merger between the two smaller firms in the market, and would increase if the market turned into a single-product firms industry. The influence of these counterfactual changes would be greater for wealthier and older individuals. This article contributes to the analysis of a food market that is rapidly growing in developing countries and is starting to play a more relevant role in consumers’ diet. [EconLit classifications: L11, D12] © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Chapter 1: The Impact of Digital Reputation Systems on Consumer Purchase and Welfare: Evidence from AirbnbDigital platforms provide a space where previous consumers can share insights about their consumption experiences and product preferences. This user-generated feedback significantly contributes to the reputation of both the seller and the product, thereby generating benefits for future consumers. In this paper, I examine the relative impacts of two commonly used reputation components, star ratings and text reviews, on consumer welfare within the short-term rental market. I first show that both components have causal effects on purchase decisions. Then, I use a censored logit demand framework to estimate their impacts on consumer welfare. I find that text reviews deliver slightly greater benefits to consumers than star ratings. Removing both types of pre-purchase information would deliver even larger decreases in consumer surplus, suggesting that ratings and reviews are imperfect complements in delivering information. Chapter 2: The Invisible Host: Race and Identifiability of Hosts on Airbnb This study investigates racial dynamics on digital platforms, focusing on Airbnb, by examining users' strategic decisions to disclose their racial identity through profile pictures. Spanning 22 U.S. cities over 2 years and creating a novel panel of host profile photos, we find that Black hosts are more likely to conceal their identity. Additionally, we apply these insights to reevaluate racial price gap estimates in existing literature, considering both identifiable and unidentifiable profile pictures. Our analysis is further enriched by an experimental survey designed to assess the impact of racial representation in host profiles on guest preferences. The results reveal a significant racial bias against Black hosts, but this gap diminishes when hosts possess positive attributes. Chapter 3: The Impact of "Double First-Class" Initiative on Students' Employment Outcomes The Double First-Class (DFC) initiative was launched by the Chinese central government in 2016 as a new higher education classification system. It officially designates the highest-ranked universities as the best in China and aims to increase education funding and grants for these institutions. The DFC initiative has significantly enhanced research output and achievements. This paper examines its impact on graduates' performance in the labor market, using data from the Annual Graduate Employment Quality Reports and survey data from a third-party platform Xinchou.com.1 By employing a difference-in-difference approach, the study reveals a limited effect on overall graduate employment rates. However, it finds an immediate and significant positive impact on salaries for employed students, primarily due to increased salary offerings from both state-owned and private enterprises. This research seeks to elucidate the mechanisms influencing graduates' performance in the job market and offers insights for the Chinese central government. It underscores the importance of refining the DFC initiative to prioritize students' labor market performance over research focus.--Author's abstract

This paper considers a supply chain that consists of a manufacturer and a retailer, who concern their respective profits as well as consumer welfare. Each firm's objective is modelled as a weighted sum of its profit and consumer surplus, with the weight on consumer surplus representing the concern level of the firm. We first examine a push supply chain where the manufacturer determines the wholesale price and the retailer determines the order quantity. We derive the optimal decisions and investigate the impact of the firms' consumer surplus consideration on the interactive decisions of the supply chain members and the overall performance of the supply chain. We show that a higher level of retailer's consumer concern does not necessarily lead to higher consumer surplus because her concern on consumers may be exploited by the manufacturer to improve his objective; and the manufacturer's concern on consumers may not benefit the retailer in terms of her profit, especially when the manufacturer's concern level is relatively low. Nevertheless, compared to the for‐profit supply chain, concern on consumer surplus could be beneficial to both firms' profits as well as consumer surplus, inducing a “win‐win‐win” situation under certain conditions. Furthermore, as a social planner, the government seeks to optimize social welfare by adopting subsidy policies, and we examine two types of intervention policies, that is, subsidizing firms and subsidizing consumers. We show that when subsidizing firms, government's quantity‐based subsidy is always more cost‐effective than sales‐based subsidy. As the firms' concern levels become higher or the demand uncertainty becomes lower, subsidizing consumers can achieve higher social welfare than subsidizing firms. Moreover, we examine the impact of the government's budget constraint and concern level on consumer surplus, and extend the analysis to a pull supply chain to show the robustness of the major findings.

Content and Access Provision in a Discrete Competition Model

This paper considers an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and a remanufacturer which produce and sell substitutable products (new and remanufactured) to a group of strategic consumers. Using a stylized two-period model, the paper studies the effects of the trade-in value for used products on consumer purchase behavior and two firms’ optimal strategies. Moreover, the value of remanufacturing on consumer surplus, total market share, and the OEM’s profit performance has also been explored. In addition, strategic consumer behavior and other model parameters, such as price reduction coefficient and consumer’s return proportion, have been investigated theoretically and numerically. Analytical Results and numerical evidences show that the optimal prices of both products will increase as more consumers consider the trade-in value or/and the trade-in value increases, leading to fewer satisfied consumers, but the OEM can be better off; both consumers and two firms can be better off as the consumer’s strategic behavior is more intensive, provided that the price reduction coefficient is relatively large. Moreover, when the consumer’s strategic behavior is relatively intensive, the slight price reduction strategy is more profitable for the OEM; while the significant reduction strategy performs better when the consumer’s strategic degree is relatively low. In addition, the incorporation of remanufactured products can make more consumers find their desired products because of better market segmentation, and can also alleviate the negative effect of consumer’s strategic behavior on the OEM’s profit performance. However, remanufacturing will slow down the positive effect of consumer’s strategic behavior on consumer surplus when the reduction coefficient is relatively small. Moreover, another interesting insight of remanufacturing can be provided: It can alleviate the impact of uncertainty in new product cost on the OEM, but exacerbate the impact on consumers.

Capital market perfection is a key assumption often made by scholars in the area of finance. Similarly, the assumption of a rational, utility maximizing consumer giving rise to demand functions which are homogeneous of degree zero in prices and income is central to a large body of research in economics. Interestingly, with firms facing menu costs, the two assumptions together impose certain dynamic restrictions on all prices and quantities in an economy. These restrictions are independent of the nature of technology, market structure, and the like. Nor do they depend upon any particular functional forms for the demand and production relationships. For these reasons they provide valuable insight into the nature and sources of economic growth. If the capital market is perfect, consumers are rational, and firms face menu costs then the time paths of prices and outputs from any model of economic growth must conform to these restrictions. Hence their importance. The paper is divided into five parts. In the second part I demonstrate that in the general case, when firms face menu costs and preferences are not homothetic, the dynamic restrictions imposed by capital market perfection and the homogeneity of demand require that the prices of all firms in an industry move together. In the third and fourth parts of the paper I consider the particular case of homothetic preferences when products are weak gross substitutes. I provide an alternative proof of co-movement of prices in an industry and show that if there are no changes in consumer's tastes then the elasticities of demand for firms are constant. If technology exhibits constant returns then it can be shown that, in the Nash non-cooperative equilibrium, firms will incur menu cost in the form of investment in productivity to reduce real cost and price. As a result the output of the economy will go up. In the fifth part I discuss some implications of the model for consumer's surplus and welfare.

Cardinality Bundling Under Oligopoly – a Simulation Model

This paper investigates the incentives to invest in improving quality (as opposed to investments in new activities) in the telecommunications industry, based on the example of wireless markets. We highlight the fact that investment incentives are positively related to potential for technical progress. They also depend on market structure, competition intensity and penetration rate. We show that for each national market, there is a target level of investment which companies strive to achieve. From a social perspective, this target level is the best amount that companies are encouraged to invest. Nonachievement of the target level entails underinvestment and a decrease in consumer surplus and welfare and may slow down technical progress. We used a data set covering 30 countries over a period of 8 years to empirically prove the existence of a change in investment behavior depending on whether or not the target level is achieved. A low margin per user may hamper achievement of the target level. As a result, maximum consumer surplus and welfare occur under imperfect competition and not perfect competition.

“Consumer welfare” is the only articulated goal of antitrust law in the United States. It became the governing standard following the 1978 publication of Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox. The consumer welfare standard has been instrumental to the implementation and enforcement of antitrust laws. Courts believe they understand this standard, although they do not bother to analyze it. Scholars hold various views about the desirable interpretations of the standard and they selectively use random judicial statements to substantiate opposite views. This article introduces the antitrust consumer welfare paradox: it shows that, under all present interpretations of the term “consumer welfare,” there are several sets of circumstances in which the application of antitrust laws may hurt consumers and reduce total social welfare. This article shows that, when Bork used the term “consumer welfare,” he obscured basic concepts in economics. This article clarifies that the antitrust methodology permits only surplus analysis and does not accommodate welfare analysis. It explains the conceptual differences between the terms “surplus” and “welfare” and the relevant implications. This article further explains the differences between two other competing standards—“consumer surplus” and “total surplus”—that presently serve as proposed interpretations for the term “consumer welfare.” Each interpretation has some limitations and the necessary analytical progress calls first for conceptual clarity. This article argues that whatever good ends the “consumer welfare” phrase may have once served, antitrust law should now lay it to rest.

Big Data and Personalised Price Discrimination in EU Competition Law

Big Data and Personalized Price Discrimination in EU Competition Law