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Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14288/6

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    PublicationOpen Access
    Market selection and the information content of prices
    (Wiley, 2021) Ekmekçi, Mehmet; Department of Economics; Atakan, Alp Enver; Faculty Member; Department of Economics; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics; 39383
    We study information aggregation when n bidders choose, based on their private information, between two concurrent common-value auctions. There are k(s) identical objects on sale through a uniform-price auction in market s and there are an additional k(r) objects on auction in market r, which is identical to market s except for a positive reserve price. The reserve price in market r implies that information is not aggregated in this market. Moreover, if the object-to-bidder ratio in market s exceeds a certain cutoff, then information is not aggregated in market s either. Conversely, if the object-to-bidder ratio is less than this cutoff, then information is aggregated in market s as the market grows arbitrarily large. Our results demonstrate how frictions in one market can disrupt information aggregation in a linked, frictionless market because of the pattern of market selection by imperfectly informed bidders.
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    PublicationOpen Access
    A comparison of game-theoretic models for parallel trade
    (World Scientific Publishing, 2018) Gnecco, Giorgio; Pammolli, Fabio; Department of Economics; Alpanda, Berna Tuncay; Faculty Member; Department of Economics; College of Administrative Sciences and Economics
    Within the EU Single Market for medicines, differences in drug prices, regulations, and transaction costs may create, under suitable conditions, arbitrage opportunities well before patent expiration, giving an incentive to the occurrence of parallel trade. When this is permitted, parallel traders may obtain a profit from buying drugs in a country where prices are lower, then re-selling them in a country where prices are higher. This phenomenon may came inefficiencies from a global welfare perspective, and reduce the manufacturers' incentive to invest in Research and Development (R & D). Given this framework, in this paper, we investigate the efficiency (expressed in terms of the price of anarchy) of the subgame-perfect Nash equilibria associated with five dynamic noncooperative game-theoretic models for the parallel trade of pharmaceuticals. We also compare such models with regard to the manufacturer's incentive to invest in R & D. More specifically, first we find in closed form the optimal value of the global welfare of two countries, which is obtained by solving a suitable quadratic optimization problem modeling the decision-making process of a global planner. Then, we use such a result. to evaluate and compare the prices of anarchy of five games modeling the interaction between a manufacturer in the first country and a potential parallel trader in the second country. The first three games refer, respectively, to the cases of no parallel trade threat, parallel trade threat, and parallel trade occurrence at equilibrium. Then, we investigate two modifications of the third game, in which its transfer payment from the potential parallel trader to the manufacturer is, respectively, removed/determined by Nash bargaining. For completeness, we also consider a decision-theoretic model of no parallel trade threat. For what concerns the incentive for the manufacturer to invest in R & D, the results of our numerical comparison show that the decision-theoretic model of no parallel trade threat is always the one with the highest incentive, whereas the two game-theoretic models of parallel trade threat/occurrence that do not include the transfer payment provide typically the lowest incentives. Moreover, the latter two models have the highest prices of anarchy (i.e., their equilibria have the lowest efficiencies). From a policy-making perspective, improvements are obtained if suitable countermeasures are taken to help the manufacturer recover from the costs of R & D, such as the inclusion of a transfer payment in the model.