Issue 4

Volume 6 JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS & MANAGEMENT STRATEGY
Winter 1997

Entry and Predation: British Shipping Cartels 1879–1929

Fiona Scott Morton
I examine the outcomes of cases of entry by merchant shipping lines into established markets around the turn of the century. These established markets are completely dominated by an incumbent cartel composed of several member shipping lines. The cartel makes the decision whether or not to begin a price war against the entrant; some entrants are formally admitted to the cartel without any conflict.

Option Contracts and Vertical Foreclosure

Ching-To Albert Ma
A model of vertical integration is studied. Upstream firms sell differentiated inputs; downstream firms bundle them to make final products. Downstream products are sold as option contracts, which allow consumers to choose from a set of commodities at predetermined prices. The model is illustrated by examples in telecommunication and health markets. Equilibria of the integration game must result in upstream input foreclosure and downstream monopolization. Consumers may or may not benefit from integration.

Nonlinear Supply Contracts, Exclusive Dealing, and Equilibrium Market Foreclosure

Daniel P. O'Brien and Greg Shaffer
We examine how the feasibility of both nonlinear pricing and exclusive dealing arrangements affect incentives for market foreclosure when two manufacturers contract with a retail monopolist. Surprisingly, we find that although market foreclosure equilibria exist, they are Pareto-dominated (from each manufacturer's perspective) by all nonforeclosure equilibria.

Tender Offers, Proxy Contests, and Large-Shareholder Activism

Sudipto Dasgupta and Vikram Nanda
The paper analyzes tender offers and proxy contests as alternative means of resolving corporate governance conflicts between dissidents and incumbent management. We show that when a dissident shareholder is sufficiently confident about the potential benefits from changing corporate policy, he will seek majority control by making a tender offer rather than initiating a proxy contest.

Regulation of Duopoly: Managed Competition vs Regulated Monopolies

Asher Wolinsky
This paper discusses the regulation of oligopolistic differentiated-product industries. The regulator can control prices and impose quantity restrictions, but cannot control the quality choices of the firms. We inquire about the optimal choice of regulatory regime—whether and under what conditions managed competition or segmentation of the market between regulated monopolies achieves better results.

The Regulation of Predatory Firms

Antoine Faure-Grimaud
This article investigates the issue of predation by a regulated firm. Since it has private information, a regulated firm obtains higher rents in case of successful predation: the fewer the competitors, the higher the marginal social value of the regulated firm's effort and the higher the informational rents.

Paying Customers to Switch

Yongmin Chen
This paper studies the business practice of offering discounts to new customers in markets with switching costs. In a two-period homogeneous-good duopoly model, it is shown that the equilibrium amount of discounts increases continuously in the expected switching costs of a typical consumer.

Limited Liability and Bonus Contracts

Son Ku Kim
This paper studies the nature of incentive contracts between a risk-neutral principal and a risk-neutral agent under the constraint that the agent's liability is limited. A necessary and sufficient condition is derived for the existence of a first-best contract under this constraint, and a bonus-based contract is shown to be the most efficient contractual form. Implications of bonus contracts are also discussed.