Partial Unraveling and Strategic Contract Timing

Renegotiations and last-minute contracting are prevalent in many vertical relationships. Information transmission between firms and buyers can be imperfect as well. In this paper we present a theory to explicate how early/delayed contracting over wholesale prices, and partial unraveling of private information, can sustain each other endogenously in a channel setting with bilateral monopoly. Should the wholesale price be predetermined, the downstream manufacturer would be compelled to fully disclose all private information. By contrast, the to-be-negotiated wholesale price can be potentially affected by manufacturer disclosure or concealment. This can represent a countervailing force for equilibrium revelation to be imperfect, even when disclosure is costless. Thus partial unraveling may emerge if and only if no enforceable contract has been signed (i.e., contracting is delayed). Conversely, partial unraveling can endogenously influence ex ante preferences for contract timing. Therefore, contracting may be deliberately delayed even without learning/cost considerations. Moreover, equilibrium contract timing can be socially too early to alleviate channel distortions, and bilateral bargaining can align private and social preferences for delayed contracting. This paper was accepted by Dmitri Kuksov, marketing.

Social Responsibility in a Bilateral Monopoly with Downstream Convex Technology

This paper shows that, in a bilateral monopoly with consumer-friendly social concerns, only the downstream firm is always incentivized to adopt corporate social responsibility (CSR) if it has decreasing returns to the input, leading to a Pareto-superior outcome in equilibrium. This occurrence differs from a standard linear bilateral monopoly in which, if the upstream (downstream) firm commits itself to CSR before the downstream (upstream) does, then both firms improve profits, while they do not deviate from pure profit-maximization if CSR levels are simultaneously chosen. Straightforward policy and empirical implications are offered, and this paper argues that the presence of CSR-type firms crucially depends on technology.

Bilateral bargaining

This chapter examines how, after discussing monopoly, many principles and intermediate microeconomics books move on to the cases of monopsony (one buyer and many sellers) and bilateral monopoly (one buyer and one seller). The analysis of monopsony is straightforward after monopoly. The monopsonist, taking their supply curve as given, equates the marginal value of the factor to them with the “marginal factor cost.” Then there is a paragraph or two about bilateral monopoly. The chapter considers what noncooperative game theory has to offer to this situation. This is a case where institutions matter (according to the theory), and rather more than seems sensible, although the extreme and unintuitive sensitivity to institutional form that one sees in the theory may be attributable to the starkness of the models in terms of what players know about each other. The chapter then looks at the problem of bilateral bargaining.

PRICING IN THE NATURAL GAS MARKET OF UKRAINE IN TERMS OF ENERGY INTEGRATION OF UKRAINE AND THE EU

The article examines the formation of natural gas prices in the Ukrainian and world energy markets. The role of energy as a driver of economic development of national and international economy due to the penetration of energy into other sectors of the economy and the formation of close relationships that promote mutual development, innovation, and competitive environment. The paper identifies the legal framework through which the natural gas market regulation in the European Union (in particular directives of the European Parliament and of the Council and guidance note on directives) and Ukraine and legislates the vector of development of the energy sector following strategic economic and environmental goals (in particular Treaty establishing the Energy Community, Association Agreement between Ukraine, of the one part, and the European Union, the European Atomic Energy Community and their Member States, of the other part, and laws of Ukraine). Based on the analysis of natural gas prices in the world energy market, the attractiveness of using natural gas as a substitute for energy products of oil refining is substantiated. To identify the pricing mechanisms used to form natural gas prices in the natural gas market in Ukraine pricing approaches used in different countries of the world are defined and described, in particular, gason-gas competition (GOG)), oil price escalation (OPE), regulated prices (including regulation: cost of service (RCS)), regulation: social and political (RSP), regulation below cost (RBC), bilateral monopoly (BIM)), free use of natural gas (No price (NP)). Based on the study of natural gas price formation mechanisms, it is established that at the present stage of development of Ukraine's energy sector is characterized by the transition from a regulated pricing mechanism in the natural gas market to gas and gas competitive prices. However, the transition phase is characterized by the partial use of the mechanism of bilateral monopoly prices. Simultaneously, it was determined that the formation of costs according to the oil formula is not typical for Ukraine's natural gas market.

Vertical Connections on the Construction Market

The specificity of construction as an economic activity and of the construction product (goods and services) determine the existence of a complex vertical chain of links, involving different actors, which they perform simultaneously the function of the buyer of the product from a previous participant and vendor product to the next participant. In practice, this means that in every unit of the vertical chain construction firm as a buyer of resources and services can be monopsony or oligopsony, on the other hand as the seller of the created product may be in the role of a monopoly or oligopoly on the market. The aim of the study is the analysis the model of a bilateral monopoly on the resource and product market, the conditions of equilibrium and the behavior of the construction firm at the entrance and the exit, taking into account the specificities of different segments of the construction market.

Information Sharing in a Supply Chain under Cap-and-Trade Regulation

Under cap-and-trade regulation, this paper investigates information sharing issues in supply chains with different structures. Adopting a game-theoretic method, we start the analysis from a simple bilateral monopoly supply chain with a manufacturer and a retailer. The model is then extended to a scenario with two competing retailers. The manufacturer provides the wholesale price and invests in carbon emission abatement level. The retailers order products to meet consumers' demand in an uncertain market. One retailer has the power to obtain private information. The results show that the wholesale price and the carbon emission abatement level respond positively to the demand signal. We find that the well-informed retailer is better off with low-demand information sharing and worse off with high-demand information sharing in a bilateral monopoly supply chain. However, the well-informed retailer can benefit from high-demand information sharing in a competitive environment. We also find that the uninformed retailer may get hurt from information sharing under certain conditions. Moreover, the manufacturer's expected profit is related to the capability of abating carbon emissions, the information accuracy, and the demand uncertainty.