Tracy R. Lewis

Supplying Information to Facilitate Price Discrimination

The authors examine the incentive of a seller to allow potential buyers to acquire private information about their tastes for the sellers product. Improved private information for buyers enables the seller to segment the market and charge higher prices to high-value buyers. However, improved information can also provide rents to buyers. In a variety of settings, this tradeoff is optimally resolved at one of two extremes: either buyers are supplied with the best available knowledge of their tastes or no information is supplied by the seller. Copyright 1994 by Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and the Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association.

Information management in incentive problems

We extend the standard procurement model to examine how an agent is optimally induced to acquire valuable planning information before he choose an unobservable level of cost‐reducing effort. Concerns about information acquisition cause important changes in standard incentive contracts. Reward structures with extreme financial payoffs arise, and super‐high‐powered contracts are coupled with contracts that entail pronounced cost sharing. However, if the principal can assign the planning and production tasks to two different agents, then all contracting distortions disappear and, except for forgone economies of scope, the principal achieves her most preferred outcome.

Protecting the Environment When Costs and Benefits Are Privately Known

In this survey I analyze different approaches for protecting the environment when stakeholders are privately informed about the costs and benefits of pollution reduction. The presence of asymmetric information calls for some important departures from the textbook prescriptions of marketable permits and emission taxes for controlling pollution. For instance, it may no longer be optimal to equate the social marginal benefits to the marginal cost of cleanup in determining appropriate abatement levels. I conclude this review with some suggestions for future research in this area.

Optimal Retail Contracts with Asymmetric Information and Moral Hazard

Constrained joint-profit-maximizing retail contracts are derived when the dealer is privately informed about demand conditions before contracting with the manufacturer. Demand is increased by dealer promotion, which is unobservable by the manufacturer. Consequently, the manufacturer does not know whether to attribute a low level of sales to a decline in demand or to a lack of promotion. We show that, in general, the optimal contract exhibits some form of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing. The type of resale price maintenance and quantity fixing depends on how price and quantity affect the link between sales and promotion.

Incentives for Monitoring Quality

We analyze a procurement problem in which the quality of the delivered product can be observed perfectly by the buyer and supplier, but may not be verifiable, i.e., may not be observable to any third party. We present a set of plausible conditions under which the equilibrium welfare of both the buyer and supplier is higher when quality is verifiable than when it is unverifiable. The welfare gain for the privately informed supplier arises even when the buyer has all the bargaining power. Thus, the interests of the buyer and supplier coincide with regard to whether delivered quality should be made verifiable.

Managing Dynamic Competition

In many important high-technology markets, including software development, data processing, communications, aeronautics, and defense, suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost. This paper examines how a buyer designs dynamic competition among rival suppliers to exploit learning economies while minimizing the costs of becoming locked in to one producer. Strategies for controlling dynamic competition include the handicapping of more efficient suppliers in procurement competitions, the protection and allocation of intellectual property, and the sharing of information among rival suppliers. (JEL C73, D44, L10)

Regulatory Options and Price-Cap Regulation

We construct a simple model of the regulatory process in which a monopoly firm has private information about its capabilities and its cost-reducing activities. The optimal regulatory policy offers the firm a choice between two regulatory regimes, one of which resembles price-cap regulation. The other regime has the firm share realized gains in surplus with consumers. We examine the optimal linking of the two regimes and show how the optimal regulatory policy varies with changes in the technological climate in the industry and with the nature of the information asymmetry between regulator and firm.

On the Nonexistence of Market Equilibria in Exhaustible Resource Markets with Decreasing Costs

This paper examines the existence of competitive equilibria in markets for exhaustible resources where there are initial economies of scale in either the extraction of the resource or the utilization of the resource as an input in production. In such instances, which are fairly common, we find that the classic Hotelling rule for competitive extraction does not apply, since competitive price equilibria generally do not exist. This is in marked contrast to static markets where the usual textbook example of firms with U-shaped average cost curves is not inconsistent with the existence of competitive equilibria. Furthermore, oligopolistic market equilibria in which resource firms act as Nash producers may also fail to exist when there are returns to scale in production.

Reputation and Contractual Performance in Long-Term Projects

The systematic cost overruns occurring in large-scale, long-term projects are rationalized as the outcome of the bilateral relationship between the sponsor and contractor in which neither party can credibly commit himself to a course of action over time. We model this long-term relationship as a sequential game in which funding for the project is based on the performance of the contractor to date. Contractors will typically work hard initially to keep costs down to increase the chances that the project will be continued. The sponsor is aware of this behavior when processing information on costs to determine whether to continue the project. We analyze the equilibrium of this process and investigate its temporal properties.

Learning by Doing and Dynamic Regulation

From experience, regulated monopolists learn to employ cost-reducing innovations. We characterize the optimal regulation of an innovating monopolist with unknown costs. Regulatory policy is designed to minimize current costs of service while encouraging development of cost-saving innovations. We find that under optimal regulation, (i) innovation is encouraged by light-handed regulation allowing the monopolist to earn greater information rents while providing greater service, (ii) innovation occurs in the absence of long-term agreements when private information is recurring, and (iii) innovation is more rapid in a durable franchise, and the regulator prefers durable franchises for exploiting learning economies.