Complex Dynamics of Mixed Triopoly Game with Quantity and Price Competition

This article investigates the dynamics of a mixed triopoly game in which a state-owned public firm competes against two private firms. In this game, the public firm and private firms are considered to be boundedly rational and naive, respectively. Based on both quantity and price competition, the game’s equilibrium points are calculated, and then the local stability of boundary points and the Nash equilibrium points is analyzed. Numerical simulations are presented to display the dynamic behaviors including bifurcation diagrams, maximal Lyapunov exponent, and sensitive dependence on initial conditions. The chaotic behavior of the two models has been stabilized on the Nash equilibrium point by using the delay feedback control method. The thresholds under price and quantity competition are also compared.

Does the CEO effect on performance differ in private versus public firms?

Scholars have long debated the effect CEOs have on firm performance, including a focus on how their effect shifts across industries, national settings, and time. Unexplored, however, is the possibility that the CEO effect might differ in publicly traded versus privately held firms. Drawing on a unique longitudinal sample of both publicly traded and large, privately held Swedish firms from 1997 to 2013, we replicate and build upon prior CEO effects studies and find that private-firm CEOs have a greater effect on firm performance, for good or for ill, than do their public firm counterparts. Our results are strengthened after controlling for industry, firm profitability, and size in a matched-pair sample. We discuss the implications and potential future research stemming from these findings.

Common Ownership and Entrepreneurship

We complement the literature on common ownership by presenting two new observations from entrepreneurial start-ups. First, given the increase in common ownership of start-ups by venture capital investors, inclusion of high-value start-ups in standard common ownership measures may actually increase aggregate measures of common ownership. Second, we suggest that even if public-firm common ownership leads to collusive inefficiency and higher prices in the short term, it may also create opportunities for entry of innovative high-growth start-ups. Consistent with this, we document that entrepreneurial activity and common ownership of start-ups tends to be higher in industries with higher common ownership among public firms.

Privately held or publicly owned? The role of debt financing

This paper examines the decision to go public under the issuance of both debt and equity financing. The decision to go public, the debt ratio and the shape of the ownership structure depend on the combination of debt and ownership structures that maximizes the initial owners’ wealth. Our model is based on a contest in which owners/managers and shareholders exert costly efforts to increase their probability of winning part of the value of the public firm where the outcome of the contest and the listing decision are affected by the cost of debt. We differ from previous research in that we model the interaction between shareholders, debtholders, and managers as a contest. Our results are largely consistent with previous research in the field where we show that in industries displaying decreasing returns to scale (or slower growth industries) it is always preferred to raise funds through the issuance of debt rather than equity while in industries displaying increasing returns to scale (or high growth industries) a positive relationship obtains between the interest rate and the issuance of equity

Regulatory Costs of Being Public: Evidence from Bunching Estimation

Many disclosure and internal governance regulations for U.S. public firms trigger when a firm’s public float exceeds a threshold. Consistent with firms seeking to avoid costly regulation, we document significant bunching around multiple regulatory thresholds introduced from 1992 to 2012. We present a revealed preference estimation strategy that uses this behavior to quantify regulatory costs. Our estimates show that various disclosure and internal governance rules leads to a total compliance cost of 4.3% of the market capitalization for a median U.S. public firm. We apply the estimated costs to firms’ public-private choice and show that regulatory costs significantly impact private firms’ decisions to go public, while have limited effects on public firms’ decisions to go private.

Mixed Duopoly Stochastic Sales Model with Advertising and Experience Gains for the Public and Foreign Competitors

In this research, we propose a stochastic model with the finite horizon of time for sales competition between the state-owned company and private (foreign) competitor. We assume that the foreign company objective function is to maximize revenues and the state-owned agent is concerned about welfare maximization. There are many stochastic models for sales, but what is new in our case is that we assume mixed oligopoly and have different types of firms: private and state owned. They have somewhat different objective functions. As a control variable, we take the advertisement expenses of the private firm. Sale bursts rate depends and the advertisement expenditure and experience stock gained. For the public firm, we assume that advertising efforts are fixed. It means that the optimal control is to maximize private firm revenues taking into account possible uncertainties of stochastic profit flow using Bellman’s optimality condition. We can find out that the Advertisement-Experience (AE) efforts of the private firm are increasing if sales are increasing. Next, the AE might decrease if the experience level of the private firm increases and we have a sales burst. To optimize the governmental policies, we check for optimal AE effort of the public firm so the social welfare achieves the maximum value.