Suchergebnisse

This Element offers a review and synthesis of the theoretical analysis of mixed oligopoly, that is a hybrid market structure in which public (state-owned) and private firms interact, using a variety of strategic variables. A distinguishing feature of a mixed oligopoly is that firms have different objectives. A public firm's objective is a notion of social welfare while a private firm is profit maximising. Privatisation and partial-privatisation of a public firm is also discussed, together with several applications from diverse subfields spanning industrial organisation, applied microeconomic theory, innovation, international trade and environment policy. The authors also discuss ways in which the original analysis has been enriched to study the interaction between providers of public sector services as opposed to traditional goods.

Innovation is a major contributory factor to economic growth. How can it be encouraged? One solution favoured especially in highly-competitive high-tech industries is cooperation in research and development. The theoretical issues raised by these joint ventures are examined in these essays which cover all aspects for growth, technology, competition and welfare. Contributions from the UK, Europe, North America and Asia ensure a broad international approach. There is an indepth study of European technology policy.

AbstractThis paper considers a non‐tournament duopoly model of process innovation. Costs of production can be reduced by firms spending on R&D. Firms are asymmetric in the sense that they may differ in their initial costs of production. It is shown that the high‐cost firm may spend more (or less) in R&D than its low‐cost rival. This main result is dependent on the relative magnitude of two important forces: the incentive effect, whereby the low‐cost firm always has a stronger incentive to spend on cost‐reducing R&D, and the effectiveness factor, which favours the high‐cost firm.

AbstractWe present a theoretical framework in which an elitist and a non-elitist university in a developed country compete by choosing admission standards and deciding whether or not to open a branch campus in a developing country. Students from a developing country attend university if either a branch campus is opened or, they can afford to move to the developed country. We find that the elitist university is more likely to open a branch campus. This result is reversed if the gain, in terms of prestige, to attend the home campus of the elitist university more than offsets a student's mobility costs. A rise in the graduate wage increases the incentive for opening a branch campus, although this incentive is stronger for the elitist university.

This article studies migration from Albania into Greece and schematically looks at the socio‐economic integration and/or exclusion of Albanians.It explores the issue of regularization: first, providing an explanation for the choices made by a government by using a simple game‐theoretic framework and, second, it outlines the current efforts made towards regularization of undocumented migrants in Greece.The game‐theoretic example shows that, under certain conditions, the optimal policy for a government is not to legalize an illegal immigrant, whereas under different conditions the optimal policy is to regularize. These conditions relate to factors such as the relative magnitude of the government's payoffs which are in turn dependent on public opinion, lobbying activities, the presence of migrants' associations and the like.The article then reviews the case of Greece, where initially migrant workers were not regularized whereas at present there exists a new legal framework for their regularization.The character of Albanian migration into Greece reflects two things: the changing global nature of international migration and the way in which migrants in Southern Europe are embedded in the specific model of Southern European post‐industrial society.

AbstractWe introduce an explicit environmental incentive into a managerial compensation contract in the context of a Cournot duopoly with pollution externalities under an emissions tax regime. We show that, depending on the effectiveness of "green" R&D, compared to a standard sales compensation contract, the explicit environmental focused contract results in more abatement. As a consequence, the regulator sets a lower emissions tax, and social welfare is higher. Moreover, in general, firm owners earn higher profits when adopting the environmental delegation contract.

We study firms' preferences towards intellectual property rights (IPR) regimes in a North–South context, using a simple duopoly model where a 'North' and a 'South' firm compete in a third market. Unlike other contributions in this field, we explicitly introduce the South's capability to undertake cost‐reducing R&D, but maintain the South's inferiority in using and managing its R&D. In contrast to traditional results, we show that the North may encourage lax IPR protection provided that its South rival's R&D productivity is not too low. In this sense, our results do not support the idea of universal or uniform IPR protection regime.

We examine the relationship between competition and innovation in an industry where production is polluting and R&D aims to reduce emissions ("green" innovation). We present an n-firm oligopoly where firms compete in quantities and decide their investment in "green" R&D. When environmental taxation is exogenous, aggregate R&D investment always increases with the number of firms in the industry. Next we analyse the case where the emission tax is set endogenously by a regulator (committed or time-consistent) with the aim to maximise social welfare. We show that an inverted-U relationship exists between aggregate R&D and industry size under reasonable conditions, and is driven by the presence of R&D spillovers.

The paper presents a non‐tournament model of process innovation with spillovers in the R&D process when firms engage in Cournot competition in the product market. It is shown that careful modelling of information‐sharing and coordination of research activities leads to the conclusion that a Research Joint Venture (RJV) will economize on scarce R&D resources. There is an analysis of the effects of R&D cooperation, in the form of an RJV, on the organization of R&D, i.e. the efficient number of research labs. R&D expenditure, which precedes production, results in lower unit costs. R&D is modelled as a two‐stage process: in the first stage, firms incur expenditure that will generate new knowledge, while in the second stage this knowledge is employed to reduce unit costs. A distinction is made between single and complementary research paths. It is shown that the RJV will operate one lab in the case of a single research path exploiting its coordination advantage. In the case of complementary research paths the number of labs the RJV will operate crucially depends on the stage of the R&D process at which diminishing returns occur: it will operate both labs when diminishing returns occur at the first stage (creation of knowledge), while it will be indifferent as to the number of labs, one or two, when diminishing returns occur in the second stage (cost reduction).