Kieron Meagher

Product differentiation and location decisions under demand uncertainty

We investigate Hotellings duopoly game of location-then-price choices with quadratic transportation costs and uniformly distributed consumers under the assumption that firms are uncertain about the exact location of demand. We characterize the unique equilibrium and the socially optimal locations. Contrary to the individual-level random utility models, location uncertainty is a differentiation force. In equilibrium, increases in the variance of the uncertainty lead to greater differentiation, higher expected equilibrium prices and profits, and a greater welfare loss.

Generalizing incentives and loss of control in an optimal hierarchy: the role of information technology

Abstract How do changes in information technology affect a firm’s organization? To answer this question I extend the existing literature on incentives and control in hierarchies to include: (i) a varying management technology; and (ii) endogenous hierarchy size. The generalization produces the new prediction that improvements in information technology produce larger hierarchies. This prediction is confirmed by published historical analysis of the emergence of the modern corporation.

Hierarchy Size and Environmental Uncertainty

We examine how a firms changing environment and the information constraints of its managers interact as determinants of the size of the firms administration. Following the recent decentralised information processing literature, we assume that it takes individual managers time to process information. A consequence is that it takes time for a firm to aggregate information, even when this task is shared. This delay increases with the amount of information that is aggregated, leading to the following trade-off: the more data the firm samples each period (and hence the larger its managerial staff), the more precisely it can estimate the state that its environment was in when the sample was taken but the more the environment has changed by the time these data are used to estimate the current state. We explore this trade-off for two computation models and for both a benchmark case of costless managers and the case of costly managers. When managers are costless, the size of the administrative staff increases monotonically, as the environment becomes more stable. In contrast, when managers are costly, optimal managerial size first increases and then decreases as a function of environmental stability.

Two-part tariffs in the Online Gaming Industry: The Role of Creative Destruction and Network Externalities

Abstract Playing computer games online is a fast growing, billion dollar industry which has received little academic attention. The industry exhibits a number of interesting economic features. The industry structure is determined by creative destruction as in Aghion and Howitt (1992) [Aghion, P., Howitt, P. 1992. A model of growth through creative destruction, Econometrica, 60(2), 323–351], with game makers experiencing market power within a genre until the game is superceded. Furthermore, the attractiveness of playing a game online depends on the existence of opponents (positive network externalities) while technical and reputational problems eventually arise (negative network externalities). We model the choice of two-part tariffs by a monopolist under creative destruction and network externalities and derive conditions for the multiple equilibria which currently exist in the industry.

The impact of hierarchies on wages

The failure of human capital theory to explain firm related effects on wages, new empirical approaches to internal labor markets, and new work on careers have all led to a recent surge in interest in how firm internal structure, and the jobs within firms, help determine wages. The least developped approach to this new area is the theory of hierarchies, which springs originally from industrial organization and the theory of the firm. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical importance of management hierarchies.

A Duopoly Location Toolkit: Consumer Densities Which Yield Unique Spatial Duopoly Equilibria

Anderson, Goeree and Ramer (1997) observe that although the Uniform consumer density is almost universally assumed in Hotelling style location games, it is more realistic to assume non-uniform distributions. Using Anderson et al.s (1997) sufficient conditions for the existence of a unique pure strategy equilibrium, we extend the list of known distributions with characterised equilibria from two (Uniform and Triangular) to seven. Our extension includes the Normal and Logistic distributions which are commonly used in empirical research. We also analyse the effects of density choice on equilibrium outcomes. Holding the mean and dispersion of consumer tastes constant, we find that the Uniform distribution inflates differentiation effects.

Uncertainty in Spatial Duopoly with Possibly Asymmetric Distributions: A State Space Approach

In spatial competition firms are likely to be uncertain about consumer locations when launching products either because of shifting demograph- ics or of asymmetric information about preferences. Realistically distri- butions of consumer locations should be allowed to vary over states and need not be uniform. However, the existing literature models location uncertainty as an additive shock to a uniform consumer distribution. The additive shock restricts uncertainty to the mean of the consumers loca- tions. We generalize this approach to a state space model in which a vector of parameters gives rise to different distributions of consumer tastes in dif- ferent states, allowing other moments (besides the mean) of the consumer distribution to be uncertain. We illustrate our model with an asymmetric consumer distribution and obtain a unique subgame perfect equilibrium with an explicit, closed-form solution. An equilibrium existence result is then given for the general case. For symmetric distributions, the unique subgame perfect equilibrium in the general case can be described by a simple closed-form solution.

Who Decides about Change and Restructuring in Organizations

We model the determinants of who makes decisions, the principal or an agent, when there are multiple decisions. Decision making takes effort and time; and, once implemented, the expected loss from a particular decision (or project) increases with the length of time since the last decision was made. The model shows delegation is more likely as: (i) controllable uncertainty increases; (ii) uncontrollable uncertainty decreases; (iii) the number of plants in the firm decreases; (iv) the complexity of the decision increases; and (v) the importance of the decision increases. The theoretical predictions are consistent with our novel empirical results on the delegation of major organizational change decisions using workplace data. Our unique data allows us to identify who made a decision to implement a significant change, as well as key internal and external factors highlighted as potentially important in our theory. Empirically, delegation is more likely in organizations that: face a competitive product market; export; have predictable product demand; have a larger workplace; and that have fewer other workplaces in the same organization producing a similar output. We find business strategy is not related to the allocation of decision making authority; delegation, however, is associated with the use of human resource techniques such as the provision of bonuses to employees.

Political Economy of Infrastructure Investment

The importance of infrastructure for growth is well established in the macroeconomic literature. Previous research has treated public investment in infrastructure as exogenous. We remedy this shortcoming by providing a political economy analysis of infrastructure choice based upon consumer preferences derived from spatial competition models. In this setting, infrastructure investment has two possible effects: to directly lower transaction costs and indirectly to affect market power. We begin with a single marketplace model in which only the direct effect is present and then bring in the indirect effect by extending the analysis to competition on the circle. Analysis of market structure, consumer participation, entry and transport cost curvature give a rich variety of results. Socially optimal outcomes occur in some cases but infrastructure traps are common. Our results suggest that in less developed countries competition enhancing policies are a key prerequisite for public support of infrastructure investment.

Confidentiality is Not Enough: Framing Effects in Student Evaluation of Economics Teaching

Contrary to previous research we show lack of anonymity is associated with large positive shifts in student evaluation of teaching. The results are consistent with the simple observation that due to higher expected future earnings economics and business students have more at stake it terms of potential retaliation by an instructor. Our analysis is based on both a comparison of distributions and ordered probit multi-variate regression. These methods overcome the statistical problems associated with previous studies which looked at differences in means for ordinal responses.