【AEW Webinar】Collusion and Innovation: The Case of LCD Cartel, 2001–2006

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• 研討會日期 : 2023-09-07
• 時間 : 08:30
• 主講人 : Professor Mitsuru Igami
• 地點 : Register and join online
• 演講者簡介 : Professor Mitsuru Igami received his PhD from the UCLA Anderson School of Management in 2012. He is currently an Associate Professor at Yale University. His research interests are Industrial Organization, Economics of Innovation, and International Trade.
• 演講摘要 : Collusion is difficult in innovative industries because the prospect of investments to achieve superior competitiveness weakens the incentive to cooperate with competitors. Nevertheless, high-profile cartel cases emerged in the liquid crystal display (LCD) panel industry in 2001–2006. We propose a tractable dynamic-oligopoly model of collusion with endogenous innovation to study the interactions between incentives to collude and innovate in this cartel. Our preliminary estimates suggest: (i) the LCD cartel achieved monopoly price levels in the first few years; (ii) the incentive to innovate would have been higher but for the cartel.
• Working Paper Title : Dynamic Competition of Real Estate Developers in Hong Kong: Lesson on Counter-cycle Policy
• Working Paper Speaker Biography : Professor Kwong Yu Wong received his PhD from the University of Washington in 2022. He is currently a Lecturer at the National University of Singapore. His research interests are Empirical Industrial Organization, Machine Learning and Applied Microeconomics.
• Working Paper Abstract : Government considers intervention frequently at the ups or downs of an industry. These state-based interventions have a smaller implementation scale and might appear to cause smaller impacts to the market overall. However, once competition over time is taken into consideration, whether the state-based policy implies smaller impacts than the policy in all states becomes unclear. Utilizing a unique transaction-level dataset converted from sales documents, I study the impact of state-based/counter-cyclical policy by structurally estimating the dynamic competition of the Hong Kong real estate primary market, in comparison with the universal/acyclical policy. By adopting the extended Oblivious Equilibrium (extended OE) that accommodates market shocks, it is shown that the policy intended goal is only achieved when the dynamic competition is ignored. Furthermore, even though counter-cycle policy is not implemented in all periods, firms would still respond in the periods without the policy under dynamic competition due to the anticipation of the future possibility to be subject to the policy. The counterfactual analysis shows that the counter-cycle policy impact is at a similar scale as the universal/acyclical policy impact. This finding calls for caution against a common perception that a counter-cycle measure necessarily causes less distortion than a full-scale acyclical measure.