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An increasing number of countries have introduced some form of prohibition of abuses of economic dependence or broadened the scope of their existing legislation. Yet, very little has been written on the economics of economic dependence, that is on economic reasoning, tools or metrics that can be relied upon to identify whether a company is economically dependent on another company. The present paper aims to fill this gap, and argues that bargaining theory and the economics of relative market power can be helpful to characterise economic dependence. We summarise a number of takeaways from this literature, and describe empirical strategies that can be relied upon to try and quantify economic dependence in specific cases.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

Product proliferation occurs in supply chains when manufacturers respond to diverse market needs by trying to produce a range of products from a limited variety of raw materials. In such a setting, manufacturers can establish market responsiveness and/or cost efficiency in alternative ways. Delaying the point of the proliferation helps manufacturers improve their responsiveness by postponing the ordering decisions of the final products until there is partial or full resolution of the demand uncertainty. This strategy can be implemented in two different ways: (1) redesigning the operations so that the point of proliferation is swapped with a downstream operation or (2) reducing the lead times. To establish cost efficiency, manufacturers can systematically reduce their operational costs or postpone the high-cost operations. We consider a multi-echelon and multi-product newsvendor problem with demand forecast evolution to analyze the value of each operational lever of the responsiveness and the efficiency. We use a generalized forecast-evolution model to characterize the demand-updating process, and develop a dynamic optimization model to determine the optimal order quantities at different echelons. Using anonymized data of Kordsa Inc., a global manufacturer of advanced composites and reinforcement materials, we show that our model outperforms a theoretical benchmark of the repetitive newsvendor model. We demonstrate that reducing the lead time of a downstream operation is more beneficial to manufacturers than reducing the lead time of an upstream operation by the same amount, whereas reducing the upstream operational costs is more favorable than reducing the downstream operational costs. We also indicate that delaying the proliferation may cause a loss of profit, even if it can be achieved with no additional costs. Finally, a decision typology is developed, which shows effective operational strategies depending on product/market characteristics and process flexibility.

The deployment of new broadband networks (NBNs) based on fiber-optic transmission technologies promises high gains in terms of productivity and economic growth, and has attracted subsidies worth billions from governments around the world in the form of various state aid programs. Yet, the effectiveness and the efficiency of such programs remains largely unstudied. We employ panel data from 32 OECD countries during 2002-2019 to provide robust empirical evidence of both. We find that state aid significantly increases NBNs by facilitating the deployment of new connections to 22% of households in the short term and 39.2% in the long term. By comparing the actual amounts of state aid support to the estimated impact on GDP growth, we also find it to be highly cost efficient, as the programs break even after three years on average.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

This paper explores how firms that lack expertise in machine learning (ML) can leverage the so-called AI Flywheel effect. This effect designates a virtuous cycle by which, as an ML product is adopted and new user data are fed back to the algorithm, the product improves, enabling further adoptions. However, managing this feedback loop is difficult, especially when the algorithm is contracted out. Indeed, the additional data that the AI Flywheel effect generates may change the provider's incentives to improve the algorithm over time. We formalize this problem in a simple two-period moral hazard framework that captures the main dynamics among ML, data acquisition, pricing, and contracting. We find that the firm's decisions crucially depend on how the amount of data on which the machine is trained interacts with the provider's effort. If this effort has a more (less) significant impact on accuracy for larger volumes of data, the firm underprices (overprices) the product. Interestingly, these distortions sometimes improve social welfare, which accounts for the customer surplus and profits of both the firm and provider. Further, the interaction between incentive issues and the positive externalities of the AI Flywheel effect has important implications for the firm's data collection strategy. In particular, the firm can boost its profit by increasing the product's capacity to acquire usage data only up to a certain level. If the product collects too much data per user, the firm's profit may actually decrease, i.e., more data is not necessarily better.

We provide a canonical and tractable model of a trade platform enabling buyers and sellers to transact. The platform charges a percentage fee on third-party product sales and decides whether to be "hybrid", like Amazon, by selling its own product. It thereby controls the number of differentiated products (variety) it hosts and their prices. Using the mixed market demand system, we capture interactions between monopolistically competitive sellers and a sizeable platform product. Using long-run aggregative games with free entry, we endogenize seller participation through an aggregate variable manipulated by the platform's fee. We show that a higher quality (or lower cost) of the platform's product increases its market share and the seller fee, and lowers consumer surplus. Banning hybrid mode benefits consumers. The hybrid platform might favor its product and debase third-party products if the own product advantage is sufficiently high. We also provide some tax policy implications.

With permission of CEPR. Accepted: RAND Journal of Economics

This paper explores how governments may efficiently inform the public about an epidemic to induce compliance with their confinement measures. Using an information design framework, we find the government has an incentive to either downplay or exaggerate the severity of the epidemic if it heavily prioritizes the economy over population health or vice versa. Importantly, we find that the level of economic inequality in the population has an effect on these distortions. The more unequal the disease's economic impact on the population is, the less the government exaggerates and the more it downplays the severity of the epidemic. When the government weighs the economy and population health sufficiently equally, however, the government should always be fully transparent about the severity of the epidemic.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).

Problem description: Classical models of queueing systems with rational and strategic customers assume queues to be either fully visible or invisible while service parameters are known with certainty. In practice, however, people only have “partial information” on the service environment in the sense that they are not able to fully discern prevalent uncertainties. This is because assessing possible delays and rewards is costly as it requires time, attention, and cognitive capacity which are all limited. On the other hand, people are also adaptive and endogenously respond to information frictions. Methodology: We develop an equilibrium model for a single-server queueing system with customers having limited attention. Following the theory of rational inattention, we assume that customers optimize their learning strategies by deciding the type and amount of information to acquire and act accordingly while internalizing the associated costs. Results: We establish the existence and uniqueness of a customer equilibrium and delineate the impact of service characteristics and information costs. We numerically show that when customers allocate their attention to learn uncertain queue length, limited attention of customers improves throughput in a congested system that customers value reasonably highly, while it can be detrimental for less popular services that customers deem rather unrewarding. This is also reflected in social welfare if the firm's profit margin is high enough, although customer welfare always suffers from information costs. Managerial implications: Our results shed light on optimal information provision and physical design strategies of service firms and social planners by identifying service settings where they should be most cautious for customers' limited attention. Academic/practical relevance: We propose a microfounded framework for strategic customer behavior in queues that links beliefs, rewards, and information costs. It offers a holistic perspective on the impact of information prevalence (and information frictions) on operational performance and can be extended to analyze richer customer behavior and complex queue structures, rendering it a valuable tool for service design.

We examine how groups fall prey to the sequence effect when they make choices based on informed assessments of complex situations; for example, when evaluating research and development (R&D) projects. The core argument is that the temporal sequence of selection matters because projects that appear in a sequence following a funded project are themselves less likely to receive funding. Building on the idea that selecting R&D projects is a demanding process that drains participants’ mental and emotional resources, we further theorize the moderating effect of the influence of the timing of the panel meeting on the sequence effect. We test these conjectures using a randomization in sequence order from several rounds of R&D project selection at a leading professional service firm. We find robust support for the existence of a sequence effect in R&D as well as for the moderating effect. We further explore different explanations for the sequence effect and how it passes from the individual to the panel. These findings have broader implications for the literatures on innovation and search in general and on group decision-making for R&D, specifically, as they suggest that a previously overlooked dimension affects selection outcomes.

Private cartel damages litigation is on the rise in Europe since early 2000. This development has been initiated by the European courts and was supported by various policy initiatives of the European Commission, which found its culmination in the implementation of the EU Directive on Antitrust Damages end of 2016. This paper explores the impact of this reform process on effective compensation of damaged parties of cartel infringements. For that purpose we analyse all European cartel cases with a decision date between 2001 and 2015, for which we analyse litigation activity and speed. Overall, we find a substantial reduction of the time until first settlement (increase in litigation speed) together with a persisting high share of cases being litigated (high litigation activity). This supports the view that the reform not only increased the claimant’s expectation about the amount of damages being awarded, but also resulted in an alignment in the expectations of claimants and defendants in the final damages amount, i.e. the European Commission succeeded in reaching its objective to clarify and harmonize legal concepts across Europe.

 

View all ESMT Working Papers in the ESMT Working Paper Series here. ESMT Working Papers are also available via SSRN, RePEc, EconStor, and the German National Library (DNB).