Issue 2

Volume 17 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Summer 2008

Stacking the Deck: Idling and Reactivation of Capacity in Offshore Drilling

Kenneth S. Corts
Independent drilling contractors own all offshore drilling rigs, which they lease to oil and gas companies for use in their pursuit of their exploration and development plans. Oil and gas companies' demand for these rigs can vary quickly and dramatically in response to changes in the world market for oil and natural gas. As a result, drilling contractors often try to manage excess capacity by idling rigs (known in the industry as “stacking” a rig), reactivating them when demand recovers. This paper examines these decisions over the course of a price cycle in 1998–2000 to investigate the role of firm and rig heterogeneity in determining drillers' decisions about idling and reactivating capacity.

Understanding the Inputs into Innovation: Do Cities Substitute for Internal Firm Resources?

Chris Forman, Avi Goldfarb and Shane Greenstein
We examine whether there is a trade-off between employing internal (firm) resources and purchased external (local) resources in process innovation. We draw on a rich dataset of Internet investments by 86,879 US establishments to examine decisions to invest in advanced Internet technology. We show that the marginal contribution of internal resources is greater outside of a major urban area than inside one. Agglomeration is less important for firms with highly capable IT workers. When firms invest in innovative processes they act as if resources available in cities are partial substitutes for both establishment-level and firm-level internal resources.

The Implications of Trade Credit for Bank Monitoring: Suggestive Evidence from Japan

Yoshiro Miwa and J. Mark Ramseyer
Firms in modern developed economies borrow from both banks and trade partners. Using Japanese manufacturing data from the 1960s, we estimate the price of trade credit, and explore some of the ways firms choose between the credit and bank loans. We find that firms of all sizes borrow heavily from their trade partners, and at implicit rates that track the explicit rates banks would charge. They borrow from banks when they anticipate needing money for relatively long periods; they turn to trade partners when they face short-term unexpected exigencies. This apparent contrast in the term structures follows, we suggest, from the fundamentally different way bankers and trade partners cut default risk. Because bankers seldom know their borrowers' industries first hand, they rely on formal legal protection (like security interests). Because trade partners know the industry well, they reduce risk by monitoring their borrowers closely instead. Because the costs to creating legal mechanisms are heavily front-loaded, bankers focus on long-term debt; because the costs of monitoring debtors are ongoing, trade creditors do not. Apparently, banks monitor less than we have thought.

Edgeworth Price Cycles and Focal Prices: Computational Dynamic Markov Equilibria

Michael D. Noel
Motivated by the apparent discovery of Edgeworth Cycles in many retail gasoline markets, this article extends the theory of Edgeworth Cycles along several key dimensions, including models of fluctuating marginal costs, differentiation, capacity constraints and triopoly. A computational approach to search for Markov perfect equilibria is taken. Edgeworth Cycles are found in equilibrium in many situations, and the shape of the cycles are found to carry information about underlying competitive intensity. Cycles in triopoly exhibit interesting coordination problems such as delayed starts and false starts.

Patents, Research Exemption, and the Incentive for Sequential Innovation

GianCarlo Moschini and Oleg Yerokhin
We develop a quality ladder model to study the R&D incentive impacts of intellectual property rights with a “research exemption” or “experimental use” provision. The innovation process is sequential and cumulative and takes place alongside production in an infinite-horizon setting. We solve the model under two distinct intellectual property regimes, characterize the properties of the relevant Markov perfect equilibria, and investigate the profit and welfare effects of the research exemption. We find that firms, ex ante, always prefer full patent protection. The welfare ranking of the two intellectual property regimes, on the other hand, depends on the relative magnitudes of the costs of initial innovation and improvements.

Technology Adoption with Multiple Alternative Designs and the Option to Wait

Luís Cabral and Cristian Dezső
Technology adoption is one the most important elements of a firm's strategy. In this paper, we address an essential, yet largely overlooked, question: What should a firm do when faced with several alternative proprietary designs of a new technology? In our base case we assume there are two technology designs, each described by an independent stochastic process of technology evolution. We show that, in equilibrium, a buyer chooses the leading technology design as soon as the discounted payoff from doing so is positive. When the option value of waiting is very high, it is jointly optimal to delay adoption. But because sellers cannot commit not to extract all of the buyer's future rents, inefficiently early adoption takes place. Strategies that improve commitment to low future license fees, such as increasing the number of competitors or cross-licensing, may alleviate the hold up problem. Although previous research stressed the benefit of such commitments in terms of increasing the rate of technology adoption, we present a class of cases when the benefit from commitment is efficiently to delay adoption.

On Some Procedures of Forming a Multipartner Alliance

Annelies De Ridder and Agnieszka Rusinowska
In the article, we study two different ways of forming multipartner alliances between firms with the central idea that procedure is an important factor in multipartner alliance formation. In the first procedure, an alliance is formed simultaneously, while in the second procedure (step-by-step) members are added one by one. In the model we present, each firm is assumed to have a multidimensional maneuvering space, which consists of all alliance positions acceptable to the firm, and an ideal position in this space. Alliances will form between the firms whose maneuvering spaces overlap. The results of the analysis confirm that procedure is an important factor in multipartner alliance formation.

Reputation and Managerial Truth-Telling as Self-Insurance

Adlai Fisher and Robert Heinkel
We investigate truth-telling by an informed insider, or manager, who repeatedly forecasts cash flows to competitive investors in a standard message game. The insider cannot trade on or sell private information, but faces imperfectly hedgeable nonwage income shocks. When compensation depends on the current stock price, a partially revealing equilibrium may exist in which the manager manipulates his reports, and hence the stock price, to reduce consumption variance. Intuitively, the manager builds reputation in good times when honesty is affordable, and exploits reputation in times of need. Endogenous reputation for honesty thus follows from a self-insurance motive.

But Is It Myopia? Risk Aversion and the Efficiency of Stock-Based Managerial Incentives

Jonathan Carmel
This paper points out that stock incentives do not lead to myopia unless they result in more emphasis on the short-term than would occur under an optimal contract. It shows that myopia findings relative to the standard used throughout the literature (first-best efficiency) are often reversed when evaluated relative to the relevant standard of optimal contracting. Results reported by the previous literature to be myopia often in fact have excessive emphasis on the long-term. The paper solves in closed-form for the region in parameter space which gives rise to these reversals and shows that it can be arbitrarily large.