Do MRSPs (manufacturer suggested retail prices) have an impact on prices?

In some countries, manufacturers are allowed to suggest to retailers how to price their goods. What does this do to prices? It may increase them if it reduces competition and the MRSP is set high. It could also increase competition if set low, as retailers may find it difficult to sell at a higher price than printed on the packaging.

Babur de los Santos, In Kyung Kim and Dmitry Lubensky report on a natural experiment in South Korea where MRSPs were banned and then allowed within a one-year span. The ban increased prices on average by 2.3%, the reintroduction reduced them by 2.6%, from which you can conclude that MRSPs increase competition. Prices were significantly below MRSPs, so it is not likely MRSPs acted as price ceilings. Rather, the authors conjecture that MRSPs help consumers in forming expectations of prices at other retailers once they see the mark-down at the current retailer. Absent the MRSP, the consumer faces higher search costs, and the retailers takes advantage by increasing the price. To be convinced of this argument, I would have liked to see some estimates by product category. Different mark-downs must have had different implications for price changes, and those should help us distinguish theories better than aggregate results.

Do clean-car subsidies disguise protectionism?

The US has complained for decades that Japan is making it difficult for American companies to export cars there. The complaints were about regulation, prices, and subsidies. Japan has had a rather easy time dismissing these complaints with the mere fact that US car companies are very reluctant to build right-hand driven cars, which are required for driving on the left side of the road in Japan. The latest US complaint is about subsidies for clean cars, which again are supposed to favor Japanese cars. I would answer that the US could maybe build cleaner cars, but let us have another look at the issue.

Taiju Kitano studies the current Japanese subsidies and the American proposal on how the subsidies should be structured. The subsidy is for scrapping old cars for replacement by fuel-efficient ones. At issue is the method for determining which fuel-efficient cars qualify. Japan has its own method for setting fuel efficiency, but this is not calculated for cars with low production or imports, like US models. That disqualifies them for the subsidy. Later, foreign ratings have been accepted for qualification, but the US complained that its city-driving standard is used, while a city/highway combination were more appropriate. Japan claims its standard is close to the city standard in the US.

The use is not solely about calculation of fuel-efficiency standards, it also about potential market shares. Kitano thus estimates an oligopolistic model to determine demands in each market and thus demanded quantities under different policies. If the goal is to improve overall fuel efficiency, both policies score equivalently. The US one would be, however, much cheaper because new cars become eligible and they substitute for cars that command larger subsidies. The US is thus mainly helping Japan reduce its expenses, while having no impact on pollution or even a positive one on profits of Japanese car makers.

How to make a profit through price obfuscation

The standard model of competition with a homogeneous good tells us that every supplier will apply the same, low price. This situation of perfect competition arises because there is no good differentiation and suppliers cannot exploit any market power, because they have none. They end up with little profit.

Suppose they can now artificially differentiate the good. Ioana Chioveanu and Jidong Zhou say this could happen in the way the price information is presented, for example by omitting taxes, or slicing the price in pieces for various components of the service, like for some flights, hotel nights or shipping fees. All this leads to price obfuscation. firms then start to compete on price and price "frame." Just look on Amazon.com how participating resellers can offer very different prices by adding wildly different shipping pricing. Or how sellers may add coupons for future purchases. And there are plenty of other examples.

Chioveanu and Zhou that within such a framework various competitive equilibria can result because consumer may get confused and fail to buy the best deal. This is equivalent to saying consumers are irrational, and of course anything can then happen. What is more interesting is that there is still competitive pressure, as suppliers may converge to more transparent pricing. Equilibria are such that firm randomize both price and price frames. If more firms enter the market (as it supports more profits), it becomes more difficult to obfuscate prices using price frames, so firms make those even more complex, resulting paradoxically in more profits.

I think it has been very welcome that in the US airline ticket prices now need to include all taxes and fees. It would not hurt if other prices could also include all taxes, but as this model shows, this needs to be initiated by the government, as the industry will not do it voluntarily. And this also shows that there is some good to say about the European Union's efforts into standardizing goods and price frames.

When do employers support minimum wages?

Germany does not have minimum wages, but there is currently a renewed debate about their introduction. As collective bargaining is largely handled at the sectoral level, one idea is to adopt sectoral minimum wages, for example by negotiating them within collective bargaining. In some sectors, there is already an informal wage this way, but this could be formalized. Given this idea of sectoral minimum wages, it is of interest to see which sectors would support them.

Ronald Bachmann, Thomas Bauer and Hanna Kröger use a survey of 800 firms in 8 sectors and uncover some interesting patterns. It looks like minimum wages are most supported where they would raise barriers of entry for competitors. This means that agreeing on a minimum wage is getting very close to cartelization. This is a feature of the fact that negotiations are done at the sectoral level. It would lead to a reduction in the number of firms, and likely to a reduction in employment as well, but for a different reason than usual with minimum wages: the cartelization reduces output and thus the labor force required for production. I suspect that if the minimum wage were set nationwide, though, this kind of support would largely vanish.

Market competition and product quality

There is common perception that more competition can lead to lower quality, as firms try to lower prices. Of course, this presupposes that buyers do not require quality, or that the trade-off between prices and quality is tilted towards giving up quality. Thus, a lowering of quality cannot be a general phenomenon, but must be limited to some good. One area where we would think that quality is important and would not be traded off is health care. Yet there is evidence that where competition increased, lower quality has been provided. How could that be?

Kurt R. Brekke, Luigi Siciliani and Odd Rune Straume provide a theory that can can explain this under particular circumstances: First, sellers need to be motivated in the sense that they care for quality. Second the marginal utility they get from profits is decreasing as they make higher profits, which implies risk-aversion. These assumption does not seem unreasonable, especially for health care provision (but not for the financial industry, for example, where the bonus payment is so important). The intuition of more competition yielding lower quality is rather twisted: increase competition, and prices fall. Profit margins are smaller, hence also profits. With a higher marginal utility of profit, sellers try harder to increase profits, and quality is a dimension that is available. How to counteract this? Make people care more about quality (how?), tax lower quality (how?). Not obvious.

Shopping hours competition

Firms not only compete with prices, but also with product characteristics. In the retail market, an important characteristic is the opening times. In some areas, for example in much of Europe, shopping times are regulated, the motivation being to give retail workers somewhat "normal" working hours. In some countries, for example the United States, there is much less regulation, and shops have extensive if not around-the-clock hours to satisfy King Customer.

Miguel Flores, who must have won the award for the shortest paper title, studies whether regulation is welfare enhancing when incumbent retailers can prevent entry of competitors by strategically choosing opening times. This essentially comes down to a model of competition through product differentiation. The standard result that regulation is bad when there is little diversity (regulation cannot promote differentiation) and good when there is a lot of it still holds here. The subtlety of the paper is to consider a situation where the incumbent chooses hours of operation, the competitor chooses to enter and its hours, and then they compete on hours. It is thus a two-dimensional space with entry deterrence on one.

The imperfect market for re-insurance

The insurance market is thought to be rather competitive, at least for the most common risks. That is in part because insurance companies are willing to take risks thanks to re-insurance, where they can insure large event risks and to some degree over-exposure. But there are rather few actors on the re-insurance market. Is this bad, and does it have an impact on the insurance market?

Sabine Lemoyne de Forges, Ruben Bibas and Stéphane Hallegatte play with a model of re-insurance and find that there is a trade-off. The lack of competition leads to sub-optimal re-insurance provision, obviously. But is also allows the few players to take on larger risks, some of which may not have been insured otherwise. And, the larger the re-insurers, the more resilient the market can be. As a regulator, this means that means that you may to let the re-insurance companies grow larger than want is optimal in terms of competition.

About a (partial) return to the gold standard

In difficult times, it is easy to blame central banks for everything. Part of their role, after all, is to play the scape goat for policies the politician do not dare implementing. But then, there is only so much the central banks can do, as Europe and the United States no "nicely" show now. A substantial ingredient in the blame game is a call for a return to the gold standard, a nostalgia for supposedly better and easier times.

Olivier Ledoit and Sébastien Lotz echo this call and study what our current understanding is about the coexistence of fiat and commodity money. In principle, we can start from the idea that currency competition is good: this would force the central bank to be more careful with its fiat money. Indeed, we have learned from money search theory that bad money does not necessarily chase good money (the old Gresham's Law). Also, if the commodity has a positive return, its monetization is beneficial as long as its storage and transaction cost is sufficiently low. The question is then on how to find a commodity that has a real return from just sitting there. There is a larger problem, though, with small denominations. How do you mint coins measured in cents when the commodity is, for example, gold? Either the coins need to be very small or they have very small commodity content, to the point that they become ... fiat money. Monetary policy also becomes tricky, as quite obviously temporary easing becomes difficult if it risks driving fiat money out.

But in the end, isn't a commodity like gold only valuable because people believe it is valuable? Gold, to take an extreme and popular case, has little intrinsic value, as I argued before, and is thus just another fiat currency. It is all a question of perception.

The iPhone must have an exclusive carrier

Aren't you angry that the particular mobile phone you prefer has an exclusive contract with a carrier? This limitation of carrier choice seems anti-competitive, if not frustrating. US anti-trust authorities seem to be getting interested in these arrangements and may intervene. It turns out that maybe they should not.

Robert Hahn and Hal Singer say exclusivity contracts are in fact the best thing that could happen for consumer welfare. Indeed, they spur competition through innovation, and the fact that the smart phone industry is innovative is hardly an understatement. Indeed, the exclusive contracts allow manufacturers to share the risk with the carrier, they make sure that both want the success of the new phone, and thus insure better reception and coverage. All this taken together induces manufacturers to take more risk and go for even faster and bolder innovations, which ultimately benefits the consumer.

Less competition is good for insurance

Competition is best, economists often claim. Except when it is not, for example in the case of natural monopolies, where the duplication of infrastructure is wasteful. THe case can also be made that competition is not as good as one would think in the insurance industry

Giuseppe de Feo and Jean Hindriks explain that adverse selection has worse consequences under competition. Indeed, in a monopoly, the insurance company can make profits on some products which allows to cross-subsidize others. With competition. profits are driven to a minimum, and cross-subsidization is minimal. This is important because cross-subsidies allows to relax the incentive constraint. This provides better coverage for high risks, but lowers participation among low risks.

One aspect that was not mentioned in the paper is that monopolistic insurers, because they have a larger market share, are better able to diversify the individual risk of the insureds. Observationally, this makes them closer to risk-neutral, and thus allows them to offer lower premiums, every else being equal. Of course, they could use their monopoly power to raise premiums, but with smart regulation or threats to entry, this can be prevented and the full social benefit can be obtained.

Price discrimination drives industry leaders to further innovate

Quality-ladder models in the innovation literature describe how firms try to outdo each other in research and development in order to become market leaders by producing the most advanced products. One log-standing result of this literature is that leaders have no incentives to innovate because it would cannibalize their own business, a result that flies in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Hélène Latzer builds a model where firms can price discriminate in a specific market. The difference with standard quality ladder models is that consumers differ by wealth, preferences are non-homothetic and only full units of technology goods can be consumed. In standard models, it is always winner-takes-all. Here, because a slightly obsolote product still has a market, a market leader may still want to innovate to capture also the market for the second-best good.

When ad avoidance backfires

Now that there is technology to avoid ads on television, advertisers are willing to pay less to air their announcements. What consequences would such a loss of revenue have on the television landscape?

Torben Stuehmeier and Tobias Wenzel say that the reduced profit opportunities should reduce entry (or favor exit) from the free-to-air television market. Note, however, that those how avoid ads are those who are bothered by them. The remainder are those the advertisers want to reach, so ads may become more numerous. In contrast, pay-TV (either pay-to-subscribe or pay-per-view) should be able to charge more for subscriptions to compensate for the reduced ad income. There is no change in revenue.

Thinking about welfare, the TiVo customers have the same utility as they pay for their subscription what they think ad avoidance is worth. But for everyone, there are now fewer channels to chose from the free-to-air market and consumers are worse off. In a pay-TV market, welfare is also reduced, as non-users pay more for subscriptions. Now extend the model of Stuehmeier and Wenzel to allow both television industries to co-exist and compete against each other. As customers have fewer free options, they will go towards the pay channels. The end result: a similar number of channels, but more you have to pay for. Consumer welfare was reduced by the availability of the TiVo box.

Note that the authors have a different concept of welfare than me. They consider not only the consumer surplus, but also television industry profits. Why would one want to consider the latter? If the argument is that it increases the income and thus the consumption of someone, why not model it explicitly? And given that the only good produced in this model is differentiated television channels (with a bad through ads), that is all what counts. Profits are just a monetary illusion here.

Open platforms versus cartels in professional sports leagues

What makes a sports league more competitive? More interesting? And more profitable? We have two basic models out there. The European model, with open entry, promotion and relegation on mostly athletic grounds, and the American model, a cartel with regulated entry and no exit except on economic grounds. Basic economics should tell us that an American league should be more profitable but of lesser athletic quality, while the European one should be providing more value, both in terms of quantity and the quality of the good (say, athleticism and entertainment).

Helmut Dietl and Tobias Duschl confirm this conjecture. Indeed, the six top revenue generating teams are European, but some of them are still not profitable, and as in the case of Manchester United, despite significant athletic success. Dietl and Duschl use platform organization, a form of two-sided market theory, to get some better understanding of sports league organizations. In this regard, European leagues can be compared to open source like Linux, open and performing, while American leagues are like Windows, underperforming but most profitable.

Table 2 from the paper summarizes well the differences between the leagues. In European ones, most clubs are members' associations that try to maximize wins. Leagues are open (promotion/relegation), there is full market coverage, hardly any relocations (I cannot think of one), and no salary caps. As a consequence, value (as defined by athleticism or entertainment) is maximized. Contrast this with American leagues, where clubs are privately owned and maximize profits. League are closed, there is rationing, frequent relocation and a salary cap. Thus, American leagues maximize value appropriation.

Advertising and GDP

How does advertising contribute to social welfare? It raises the awareness about products, and thus should increase utility of people. But there is also some waste of resources when competitors outdo each other with advertising. Think for example of all the resources devoted by Coca-Cola and Pepsi to sway user between two essentially identical products. So, in the end, is advertising good or bad?

Benedetto Molinari and Francesco Turino point to a positive correlation between GDP and advertising in the OECD and try to rationalize this within the Neoclassical growth model. They find that the impact of advertising is rather through the labor supply. As individuals want to consume more, they need to work more to generate the necessary income. This increases GDP (8% for the US) and utility. And as advertising itself amounts to about 2% of GDP in the US, the net contribution to GDP remains strongly positive, at least at current levels.

Do big boxes displace mom-and-pop stores?

When Wal-Mart moves into town, is this good or bad? It is commonly perceived that this is bad for local businesses, and especially for small "mom-and-pop" stores. In reality, that depends on whether big-box stores like Wal-Mart are complements or substitutes. Intuitively, they should be largely substitutes with respect to the shops they directly compete with, while there may be complementarities with other shops as they attract more customers to town.

John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin and C.J. Krizan confirm this intuition. Surprisingly, this was not a clear result from the previous literature. The difference here is that establishment level data is used, and that employment dynamics within a metropolitan area are studied.

That being said, what is so bad about seeing mom-and-pop stores closing? These are high inefficient retailers, and if similar retailing services can be provided at lower cost, we should go for it. If people value a different retailing experience, they should be willing to pay for it, and visibly they are not. Banning big boxes only provides rents to existing inefficient businesses.

Open source and private firms can coexist

Open source is a mystery to many, given that contributors give away their innovations and competitors can just scoop them up. One would thus think that an industry would either be proprietary or open source, but not both at the same time.

Gastón Llanes and Ramiro de Elejalde show that it is possible. The critical features are that the open and proprietary goods not be perfect substitutes and that open source firms need to sell for a price a complementary good to the open one. That does not seem to be very constraining, as they need this anyway to survive, even without competition from proprietary goods. A perfect example for this is the database management industry, where the free MySQL is doing very well despite Oracle and Microsoft SQL.

One consequence of this is that some industry associations that like to pretend they represent the whole industry should stop chasing those that support an open source model. The music industry seems to be a perfect example here.

The proper way to create education vouchers

Education vouchers are supposed to create competition among schools to improve the level of education within a school district. In particular, it is supposed to help students get out of particularly bad schools and into better ones. The reality is, however, quite different. The best schools get even better because they can afford to become more choosy, and the differences across schools become even larger. So how could this be fixed?

Dennis Epple and Richard Romano suggest that school voucher should not be just blank checks. You need to be subtle. If you want to achieve high and equal quality education, the amount of the voucher needs to decrease with student ability, and the school need to accept them as full tuition. This requires large vouchers, and thus high taxes to finance them. Epple and Romano show that a less expensive system is possible, all you need is attach various constraints to the use and amount of the voucher. And this still works if students or schools can choose to opt out.

The key to all this is to prevent schools from making too much profit from vouchers. Essentially, vouchers increase the paying capacity of schooling demand, and schools exploit this. To counteract this, they need to be constrained, either by disallowing them to accept payments in addition to the voucher (or they would just charge the usual tuition plus voucher and laugh all the way to the bank), or allow side payments with more strings attached. The former seems much easier to implement and monitor, though. Also critical is that voucher amounts should not depend on the income or wealth of parents. Then, one can prevent richer schools from getting even richer with more rich kids.

Competing schools are more efficient

Economists have long advocated that competition improves the efficiency of an industry. Elementary education, however, is typically a state monopoly, and where private education is offered, it is typically much more expensive as not subsidized. While there are locations where voucher programs allow parents to use the subsidy elsewhere, it is hard to find examples where public systems compete with each other.

David Card, Martin Dooley and Abigail Payne look at an example that comes close to this: Ontario, Canada, has a parallel state school system for Catholics. The later can choose where to send their children, and thus the spatial variation in the proportion of Catholics in the population can provide interesting insights in the efficiency of local schools.

The general idea is that in areas with a larger share of Catholics, non-catholic schools has larger incentives to improve to attract these children, especially if parents are not particularly attached to religious education. Using detailed data at the school and child level, this study finds that competition does indeed improve performance as measured by student achievement. One more example highlighting that school choice is good.

Airlines should not be bailed out again

The International Air Transport Association (IATA), representing most airline companies in the world, just adopted a resolution calling all governments to help this industry. It is asking for lower taxes, more cross-border merger flexibility, lower wages and lower fuel costs. But why should governments bother?

Airlines have at numerous times received substantial help from governments. Some can be justified, like when the US government curtailed air traffic after 9/11. But the fact that this industry has overcapacity and cannot sell tickets to cover its own costs calls for a market correction (bankruptcies, reducing capacity) not government intervention. This industry is already subsidized (explicitly: security agencies, tax breaks; and implicitly: gas priced lower than what externatilities would call for), it should not ask for more.

Is it of national interest to have this much capacity in the air? No. Is it of national interest to have some airlines? Possibly, but this does not mean the whole industry should be bailed out.

World competitiveness rankings

The latest World Competitiveness Yearbook is in. While all rankings need to be taken with a grain of salt, they still give some information. In this case, over 300 indicators relating to economic performance, infrastructure, government and business efficiency are collected. While one can discuss the methodology of aggregating these indicators, the yearbook has value in the compilation of this wealth of data.

The USA is number 1 again this year (see the 2008 "scoreboard", from 2007 data), followed by a series of smaller nations (Singapore, Hong Kong, Switzerland, Luxembourg). In fact, it is somewhat puzzling that so many small countries are ahead of the larger European countries. Germany is 16th, just ahead of China, the UK 21st. In that respect, the USA is an anomaly.

Will it last? Twenty years ago, the USA was 3rd, well behind Japan and Switzerland. If Japan managed to drop all the way to 22nd, The US could as well, and the current pessimistic mood may indicate that. Especially as Japan was then hit by low interest rates and a major banking crisis...