Guangliang Ye

Mixed Oligopoly, Sequential Entry, and Spatial Price Discrimination

This paper is the first to examine the welfare consequences of a public firm in a traditional model of spatial price discrimination. It demonstrates that when a private firm acts as a Stackelberg location leader, the presence of a public firm always improves welfare. Moreover, when three firms locate sequentially, the presence of a public firm improves social welfare unless it locates last. Thus, despite examining a variety of location timings, including simultaneous location, privatization never improves welfare and usually harms welfare. This conclusion differs from several currently in the literature in which privatization often improves welfare. (JEL L13, L32, L33, L52)

Partial Privatization in a Mixed Duopoly with an R&D Rivalry

This paper is the first to examine the incentive for partial privatization in a mixed duopoly with R&D rivalry. We show that because mixed duopolies engage in more R&D, the optimal extent of privatization is unambiguously reduced. Yet, this reduction is often very modest. Adopting the extent of privatization that would be optimal if one ignored the R&D rivalry routinely results in greater welfare than retaining a fully public firm and ignoring partial privatization. Only when R&D has an extremely low cost would it be preferable to ignore partial privatization.

Superstition and “lucky” apartments: Evidence from transaction-level data

Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004-2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad luck. We find that secondhand apartments located on floors ending with “8�? fetch, on average, a 235 RMB higher price (per square meter) than on other floors. For newly constructed apartments, this price premium disappears due to uniform pricing of new housing units, but apartments on floors ending in an “8�? are sold, on average, 6.9 days faster than on other floors. Buyers who have a phone number containing more “8�?’s are more likely to purchase apartments in a floor ending with “8�?; this suggests that at least part of the price premium for “lucky�? apartments arises from the buyers’ superstitious beliefs.

Privatisation and Timing in a Mixed Oligopoly with Both Foreign and Domestic Firms

This paper models a mixed oligopoly with both a domestic and a foreign private firm and examines the resulting timing in the quantity setting game. We demonstrate that with a single simultaneous pre-game delay stage, the resulting endogenous timing has either the public firm leading or the two private firms leading. An alternative characterisation of the pre-game stage results in the single timing in which the two private firms lead and the public firm follows. For all timings that emerge endogenously, we show that privatisation will always lower domestic welfare but its influence on global welfare is ambiguous.

How does a public innovator license a foreign rival

This paper uniquely considers the optimal two‐part fee of a public firm innovator licensing to a more efficient foreign rival. This is both theoretically interesting and empirically relevant. While previous research emphasises the importance of fixed fees for public firms, we show that, in this case, ad valorem fees typically dominate both fixed fees and per unit royalties. This domination carries over when a private domestic competitor is also added to the market.

Optimal Partial Privatization with Asymmetric Demand Information

We study a mixed duopoly in which only the private firm directly knows product demand and examine a pooling equilibrium in which a welfare-maximizing government may partially privatize the public firm. We show that the optimal extent of privatization differs, often dramatically, from that without asymmetric information. Indeed, we identify circumstances in which the optimal extent of privatization is zero, in sharp contrast with previous work. In addition, the consumer surplus in the pooling equilibrium routinely exceeds that without asymmetric information, and the social welfare exceeds that without asymmetric information when the cost convexity is small.