We compare welfare and profits under price and quantity competition in mixed duopolies, in which a state-owned public firm competes against a private firm. It has been shown that price competition yields larger profit for the private firm and greater welfare if the two firms move simultaneously, regardless of whether the private firm is domestic or foreign. We investigate Stackelberg competitio...

We explore how competitive disadvantage affects firms’ incentives to disclose or withhold information of common interest to competing firms within a Cournot duopoly. We establish the existence of a unique disclosure equilibrium to the problem of firms disclosing private information about aggregate demand, and show that firms choose to withhold information of either very high or very low demand....

This paper studies the effects of quota-based labor regulations on firms in the context of Saudi Arabia’s Nitaqat program, which imposed quotas for Saudi hiring at private firms. I use a comprehensive firm-level administrative dataset and exploit kinks in hiring incentives generated by the quotas to estimate the effects of this policy. I find that the program increased native employment at subs...

Consider a research lab that owns a patent on a new technology but cannot develop a marketable final product based on the new technology. There are two downstream firms that might successfully develop the new product. If the downstream firms’ benefits from being the sole supplier of the new product are private information, the research lab will sometimes sell two licences, even though under com...

This paper analyzes the effects of buyer search costs and incomplete information, private and common knowledge of the sellers, on seller competition. It turns out that small changes in search costs may have large but quantifiable effects on pricing when the seller has good private knowledge about the buyer, but the common knowledge of the buyer valuations is lacking among the sellers. As an app...

The Japanese government initiated a series of regulatory reforms in the mid-1990s. The Japanese urban gas industry consists of various sized private and non-private firms. Numerous previous studies find that deregulation leads to productivity improvements. We extend the literature by analyzing deregulation, privatization, and other aspects of a regulated industry using unique firm level data. T...

The effects of information on market design are explored in a simple setting where firms have private information about their correlated fixed costs and the government aims to maximize its expected revenue conditional on achieving efficient allocations. Government revenues are higher when the costs are less correlated (or are more of a private value). The reduced correlation increases the firms...

Firms with different ownership structure behave differently. Currently there are three major ownership structures in China’s industrial sector: state enterprises, collective enterprises, and private enterprises Market-oriented economic reform has given great autonomy to firm managers in terms of decision making. Nevertheless, properties are still owned by different levels of governments in the ...