Shinn-Shyr Wang

The determinants of pornography actress production

ABSTRACT This study investigates empirically the influences of physical appearances and risky sex in the production of adult video (AV) actresses. By analysing data concerning the Japanese AV actresses whose careers commenced between 2002 and 2013, we found that significant increases in the number of video shots of actresses are brought by cup sizes, working experiences, experiences as models or entertainers, and acting in videos of risky sex, but acting in risky sex videos has no significant influence on the production of those with greater cup sizes or serving as models or entertainers. We interpret that these actresses attract the market attention by their favoured appearances, and thus have no incentives to raise their production by acting in risky sex videos.

Buyer Market Power and Vertically Differentiated Retailers

We consider a model of vertical competition where downstream firms (retailers) purchase an upstream input from a monopolist and are able to differentiate from each other in terms of quality. Our primary focus is to study the effects of introducing a large retailer, such as a WalMart Supercenter, that is able to lower wholesale prices (i.e. buyer market power). We obtain two main results. First, the store with no buyer market power responds to the presence of the large retailer by increasing its quality, a finding that is consistent with recent efforts by traditional retailers to enhance shoppers’ buying experience (i.e. quality). Second, the presence of a large retailer causes consumer welfare to increase. There are, however, two reasons for the increase in consumer welfare: consumers gain from the large retailer’s low price (because the upstream discount is partially passed on to the retail price) as well as from the high quality level offered by the traditional retailer. Contrary to the conventional wisdom most of the consumer welfare gains seem due to the latter. The intuition for this result is that price competition softens substantially as a result of firms’ quality differentiation. We also investigate the effects of buyer market power on retail and wholesale prices as well as on producer welfare.