Issue 4

Volume 10 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Winter 2001

Optimal Money Burning: Theory and Application to Corporate Dividends

B. Douglas Bernheim and Lee S. Redding
We explore signaling behavior in settings with a discriminating activity and several costly nondiscriminating (“money-burning”) activities. Existing theory provides no basis for selecting one method of burning money over another. When senders have better information about activity costs than receivers, each sender's indifference is resolved, the taxation of a money-burning signal is potentially Pareto-improving, and the use of the taxed activity becomes more widespread as the tax rate rises. We apply this theory to dividend signaling. Its central testable implication—that an increase in the dividend tax increases the likelihood of dividend payout—is verified empirically.

The Strategic Effects of Vertical Market Structure: Common Agency and Divisionalization in the US Motion Picture Industry

Kenneth S. Corts
I examine the release-date scheduling of all motion pictures that went into wide release in the US in 1995 and 1996 to investigate the effects of vertical market structure on competition. The evidence suggests that complex vertical structures involving multiple upstream or downstream firms generally do not achieve efficient outcomes in movie scheduling. In addition, analysis of the data suggests that the production divisions of the major studios act as integrated parts of the studio, rather than as independent competing firms.

Strategic and Queue effects on Entry in Spanish Banking

Lucio Fuentelsaz andJaime Gomez
This paper analyzes the factors that influence entry and geographic diversification decisions, a topic of special strategic interest in a context of growing globalization. The empirical model we propose is tested in a framework— the Spanish savings-bank market—where recent deregulation has eliminated the legal barriers to entry. Our results show two important conclusions for the evolution of the effects of branching deregulation in Europe and the US. First, it seems that entry in new geographical markets has been impeded by the strategic interactions between entrants and incumbents. Second, savings banks exhibit a preference for closer locations at the time of expanding, which may have undermined the effects of deregulation and its potential benefits for consumers.

Asymmetric Information, Bargaining, and International Mergers

Satya P. Das and Sarbajit Sengupta
The formation of international mergers is examined in the presence of two kinds of asymmetric information, one when a local firm has private information on market size and the other when a foreign firm has private information on its technology. In each situation, parametric configurations are identified under which a merger offer may or may not be made. It also examines the kind of offer and the probability of its acceptance. The likelihood of a merger beingformed is also related to the basic market size, demand uncertainty, and cost uncertainty. Welfare effects of tax/subsidy policies by the host country are also analyzed.

Financially Interlinked Business Groups

Maitreesh Ghatak and Raja Kali
Financial interlinkage, in the form of cross-holding of equity and debt between firms, characterizes business groups in many countries. We suggest that such financial interlinkage can be viewed as a way to solve credit rationing caused by asymmetric information. If firms possess better information about each other than a bank, then business groups can be a mechanism to induce firms to sort on the basis of this information. Banks can offer a menu of contracts that vary in the extent of financial interlinkage to induce firms to self-select on the basis of the equilibrium composition of the business groups they can form.

Price Competition and Advertising Signals: Signaling by Competing Senders

Mark N. Hertzendorf and Per Baltzer Overgaard
Can price and advertising be used by vertically differentiated duopolists to signal qualities to consumers? We show that pure price separation is impossible if the vertical differentiation is small, while adding dissipative advertising ensures the existence of separating equilibria. Two simple, but nonstandard, equilibrium refinements are introduced to deal with the multisender nature of the game, and they are shown to produce a unique separating and a unique pooling profile. Pooling results in a zero-profit Bertrand outcome. Separation gives strictly positive duopoly profits, and dissipative advertising is used by the high-quality firm when products are sufficiently close substitutes. Finally, compared to the complete-information benchmark, the separating prices of both firms are distorted upwards when the degree of vertical differentiation is large, and downwards when it is small.