scholarly journals How do Fines and Their Enforcement on Counterfeit Products Affect Social Welfare?

Author(s):  
Marta Biancardi ◽  
Andrea Di Liddo ◽  
Giovanni Villani

AbstractWe consider a differential game which models the competition between a genuine and a counterfeit producer. The genuine manufacturer acts as a leader, first announcing the price of the product and the investments in advertising. After observing the leader’s decisions, the counterfeiter sets the selling price of the fakes. We assume that the demand of the good is driven by the brand-name goodwill. We calculate the Stackelberg feedback equilibria and the social welfare, defined by the unweighted sum of the genuine and fakes consumers, the profit of the genuine firm, minus the enforcement costs borne by the social planner. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly we study the dependence of social welfare on the amount of the fines established in the IPR law and monitoring efforts. Then, we compare prices, profits and social welfare under Nash and Stackelberg framework.

Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1280
Author(s):  
Zixuan Wang ◽  
Xiuzhang Li

In the competitive market environment, the growth of new energy vehicles (NEVs) faces many obstacles. Demand subsidy or production regulation-related policies are widely used to promote the development of NEVs. A comparative analysis of the effects of the two types of policies on the competitive vehicle market requires further study. To fill this gap, we investigate which type of policy is more preferable from the perspective of the social planner. In this paper, we construct a Stackelberg game with a welfare-maximizing social planner and two profit-maximizing manufacturers producing NEVs and fuel vehicles (FVs), respectively. Interestingly, although both types of policies can increase the quantity of NEVs, demand subsidy also promotes the growth of total vehicles at the same time; in contrast, production regulation reduces the total vehicles. Moreover, compared with the benchmark that no policy intervention, demand subsidy generally improves social welfare, while production regulation improves social welfare only with high consumer preference for NEVs. Nevertheless, production regulation always has a positive impact on the environment, whereas demand subsidy may have a positive impact only when the NEV is very environment friendly. The numerical results show that consumer environmental preferences and the regulation of environmental impact determine which type of policy dominates the other.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
HAO WANG ◽  
XUNDONG YIN ◽  
ALICE Y. OUYANG

This study evaluates the partial exclusion effects of store promotion. We find that a manufacturer with a better brand name has a higher willingness-to-pay for promotion services offered by retail stores or online platforms. The promotion results in higher sales-weighted average prices (wholesale and retail) and a larger inter-brand price gap. The stores or platforms extract more profits from manufacturers and consumers through the promotion services. The effects on consumer surplus and social welfare depend on whether the promotion alters consumer preferences. If it does, more consumers would be choosing their less-preferred brands because of the larger inter-brand price gap, which would be socially inefficient. If it does not, the promotion may help to correct the price distortion, but the social welfare effect is positive only when the promotion effect is small enough. In both cases, the promotion services reduce the total consumer surplus by softening inter-brand competition.


2006 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilko Bolt ◽  
Alexander F. Tieman

Using a simple model of two-sided markets, we show that, in the social optimum, platform pricing leads to an inherent cost recovery problem. This result is driven by the positive externality of participation that users on either side of the market exert on the opposite side. The contribution of this positive externality to social welfare leads the social planner to increase users' participation by setting prices at both sides of the market such that the total price is below marginal cost. Our result holds for both interior pricing and skewed pricing in two-sided markets. These findings may have interesting consequences for antitrust regulation.


2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham L. Wickelgren

Abstract While it is typically taken for granted that settlement of lawsuits increases social welfare, this paper shows that settlement can lower welfare. If the defendant has private information about the harm from his action both at the time of the action and the time of settlement bargaining, then defendants who cause different levels of harm can pay the same settlement amount in a partial pooling equilibrium. Settlement acts as a damage cap, preventing the defendant's liability from increasing with the harm over the full range of possible harms, leading to under-deterrence. This result holds even though the social planner can choose the socially optimal damage rule.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 615-636 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wei Sun ◽  
Shiyong Li ◽  
Naishuo Tian

This paper mainly studies customers’ equilibrium balking behavior in Markovian queues with single vacation and geometric abandonments. Whenever the system becomes empty, the server begins a vacation. If it is still empty when the vacation ends, the server stays idle and waits for new arrivals. During a vacation, abandonment opportunities occur according to a Poisson process, and at an abandonment epoch, customers decide sequentially whether they renege and leave the system or not. We consider four information levels: the fully/almost observable cases and the almost/fully unobservable cases, and get the customers’ equilibrium balking strategies, respectively. Then we also get their optimal balking strategies for the almost observable and the almost/fully unobservable cases, and make comparisons of customer strategies and social welfare for the almost observable and the almost/fully unobservable queues with single vacation and multiple vacations. Because of abandonment, we find that the customers’ equilibrium threshold in a vacation may exceed the one in a busy period in the fully observable queues. However, it has little effect on their equilibrium threshold in the almost observable queues, although frequent abandonment opportunity arrival inhibits their optimal threshold. Interestingly, for the almost unobservable queues, customers who arrive in a busy period are not affected by reneging that happened in the previous vacation when they make decisions of joining or balking, whereas the social planner expects that the customers can take it into consideration for social optimization. In the fully unobservable queues, because of no information, possible reneging surely influences customers’ equilibrium and optimal balking behavior. For the almost observable and the almost/fully unobservable queues, the optimal social welfare is greater in the queues with single vacation than that in the queues with multiple vacations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 569-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Zhang

We study customers’ joining strategies in an M/M/1 constant retrial queue with a single vacation. There is no waiting space in front of the server and a vacation is triggered when the system is empty. If an arriving customer finds the server idle, he occupies the server immediately. Otherwise, if the server is found unavailable, the customer enters a retrial pool called orbit with infinite capacity and becomes a repeated customer. According to the different information provided for customers, we consider two situations, where we investigate system characteristics and customers’ joining or balk decisions based on a linear reward-cost structure. Furthermore, we establish the social welfare of the system and make comparisons between the two information levels. It is found that there exist thresholds of system parameters such that the social planner would prefer revealing more information when the system parameter is greater than or less than the corresponding threshold.


2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ahmad Bello Dogarawa ◽  
Suleiman Muhammad Hussain
Keyword(s):  

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document