To examine the effects of peer pressure in adverse selection problem, we define a peer pressure function that represents the psychological costs and incorporate it into the agent's utility function. Based on these assumptions, the efficient agent who has conformity preference produces less...

type="main" <title type="main">ABSTRACT</title> <p>The paper analyses the optimal pricing of the product quality scheme when concerns for relative standing exist among consumers. We demonstrate that if the proportion of high-value consumers is over (respectively, under) 1/2 of the total consumers, a firm has an incentive to...</p>

This paper examines the issue of the first-mover and second-mover advantage in a vertical structure in which each manufacturer trades with a separated retailer via two-part tariffs. Compared to the canonical result in one-tier market, we find that the manufacturers' preference orderings over...

We investigate government subsidy policies in which a home firm and a foreign firm choose to strategically set prices or quantities in a third market. We show that even though each firm can earn higher profits under Cournot competition than under Bertrand competition regardless of the nature of...

By introducing the government's preference for tax revenues into unionized mixed duopolies, this paper investigates how the preference can change the government's choice of tax regimes between ad valorem and specific taxes. Main results are as follows. Given that one of the tax regimes is...

This paper examines the endogenous choice of competition mode with strategic export policies in vertically related markets. We show that (i) regardless of the nature of goods, choosing Bertrand competition is the dominant strategy for downstream firms, which leads downstream firms to face a...

By introducing the excess burden of taxation into unionized mixed and privatized oligopolies, we show that (i) if the government that maximizes social welfare values with a small weight of excess burden of taxation, privatization matters regardless of the number of firms; however, (ii) when the...