John S. Heywood

We examine the myopic price changes based on the inverse elasticity pricing rule for a multiproduct firm. By myopic, we mean ignoring that elasticity likely changes with price and that marginal cost likely changes with quantity. Unlike with a single product firm, constant demand elasticities and marginal cost do not cause the inverse elasticity rule to yield the profit-maximizing price change. The price change will be too large if the related products are complements which are relatively inelastic and too small otherwise. Importantly, whether non-constant marginal cost causes too large or too small, a price change is independent of whether the related products are substitutes or complements. Increasing marginal costs always causes too large an increase and decreasing marginal costs always causes too small an increase. While not providing a full characterization, we partially identify the net effects of allowing elasticities …

We show that the presence of a public firm can deter private firms from relocating to foreign countries in response to high domestic taxation. We also examine partially privatized public firms showing that the higher the exogenous domestic profit tax, the larger the public ownership share needs to be to deter private firm mobility. We illustrate that deterring mobility increases domestic welfare.

An upstream firm provides a valuable component with either an exclusive or nonexclusive contract to two downstream firms on a horizontal market. The downstream firms engage in either uniform pricing or spatial price discrimination. The component provider is more likely to sign an exclusive contract under discriminatory pricing. Discriminatory pricing generates higher welfare when both pricing methods result in exclusive contracts and generates the same welfare when both methods result in nonexclusive contracts. Importantly it generates lower welfare when discriminatory pricing results in exclusive contracts and uniform pricing results in nonexclusive contracts. These results prove robust to a variety of model variations.

We uniquely examine an upstream mixed duopoly engaging in spatial price discrimination across a continuum of downstream markets. The monopoly firms in those markets face elastic final demand creating double marginalization. The upstream public firm faces a cost disadvantage relative to its private rival that declines as it is partially privatized. We show that the fully public firm improves social welfare relative to a private duopoly when it is not overly inefficient and when differentiation is sufficiently large. We also show that whenever this is the case, there exists an optimal degree of partial privatization that better aligns the trade-off between production costs and pricing distortions.

We uniquely study the private provision of price excludable public goods in a duopoly. Simultaneous price competition generates only a mixed strategy equilibrium. Price leadership generates a pure strategy equilibrium with the leader setting a lower price and serving most consumers. This leadership game is the endogenous timing choice and improves welfare relative to monopoly provision. We re-examine these results under production in advance. The leadership game no longer remains a unique timing choice but the profit under production in advance is strictly larger.

Using US survey data, we show that those on performance pay work substantially longer hours. This remains in worker fixed-effect estimates and in worker with employer fixed-effect estimates. The magnitudes confirm increased hours as a dimension of the anticipated effort response and long hours as a potential intermediary between performance pay and reduced worker health. Despite managers being the most likely to both receive performance pay and work long hours, this association largely reflects sorting and not the behavioral response evident for other workers.

A large body of research links performance pay to poorer worker health. The mechanism generating this link remains in doubt. We examine a common suspect, that performance pay causes employees to work longer hours in pursuit of higher pay. Using UK data, we demonstrate that performance pay is associated with more work hours and a higher probability of working long hours. Yet approximately two thirds of these differences reflect worker sorting rather than behavioral change. The remaining effects are small except those for labourers. Indeed, controlling for hours of work does not diminish the link between worse self-reported health and performance pay.

We analyze equilibrium locations of downstream retailers assuming transport cost from a monopoly input supplier. When the upstream transport costs equal those of retailers, a downstream monopoly may locate efficiently and two downstream firms never locate inefficiently. Even with discriminatory pricing upstream, two downstream firms locate efficiently. When assuming downstream transport costs are greater than upstream costs, routinely inefficient locations reemerge in keeping with previous literature.