Monopoly and Competition in the Market for Durable Goods
Monopoly and Competition in the Market for Durable Goods
复制标题
耐用品市场的垄断与竞争
DOI：
10.2307/2296454
复制
发表时间：
1973
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
P. Swan
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
E. Sieper;P. Swan
虽然经济理论把相当多的注意力集中在企业作为资本的使用者和积累者上，但对其作为耐用资本品生产者的作用的分析似乎受到了相对的忽视。然而，近年来，受威克塞尔（Wicksell）在经典处理阿克曼问题（Ackerman’s problem）的过程中提出的耐用品生产模型的启发，一些论文帮助纠正了这种平衡。现代作家，如D. D. Martin [5]， E. Kleiman和T. Ophir， D. Levhari和T. N. Srinivasan[5]和R. L. Schmalensee[6]，通过处理产品衰变的不同时间曲线，并通过考虑垄断和竞争的情况，详细阐述了Wicksell的分析。然而，他们都遵循威克塞尔的观点，把注意力集中在一个假设的长期均衡上，在这个均衡中，产品的耐用性、生产速度和整个产品库存提供的服务流量都是恒定的。这种长期均衡假设的便利之处在于，它保证了生产率与总产品服务之间的简单关系，以及产品价格与产品服务价格之间的简单关系。这些关系使得人们熟悉的马歇尔对竞争条件下价格和产出决定的分析，可以很容易地推广到耐用品市场，而且似乎也允许在垄断情况下进行类似的直接推广。然而，这种简单是有代价的。局限于长期均衡情况的分析并不能说明该行业在短期内的行为，也不能说明作为利润最大化的结果而达到长期均衡的条件。更严重的是，由于将他们的注意力局限于长期均衡的位置，上面提到的那些将威克塞尔的结果扩展到垄断案例的作者，已经导致他们忽视了杰文的格言：“在商业中，过去的事情永远是过去的……”；这个错误产生了一个戏剧性的但错误的结论，即在相同的（恒定的）成本和需求条件下，垄断者生产的耐用资产将少于完全竞争者。因此，本文的目的之一是分析耐用品的生产，在竞争和聚钼的替代制度下，没有强加在一开始的假设，即该行业处于长期均衡状态。由于随着时间的推移，行业的发展关键取决于固定成本的相对重要性，我们在第三部分中讨论了极端情况，即所有成本在短期内都是可以避免的，而固定成本在第五部分中被引入。在第四部分中，次要目标是确定在早期长期垄断均衡分析中所犯的错误，并展示天鹅b[8]的结论是如何得出的
While economic theory has concentrated considerable attention on the firm as a user and accumulator of capital, analysis of its role as a producer of durable capital goods appears to have suffered comparative neglect. In recent years, however, a number of papers, inspired by the model of durable goods production developed by Wicksell in the course of his classical treatment of Ackerman's problem [10], have helped redress the balance. Modern writers, such as D. D. Martin [5], E. Kleiman and T. Ophir in this journal [3], D. Levhari and T. N. Srinivasan [4] and R. L. Schmalensee [6], have elaborated upon Wicksell's analysis by treating alternative time profiles of product decay and by considering the case of monopoly as well as that of competition. However, they have all followed Wicksell in confining their attention to an assumed long-run equilibrium in which the durability of the product, the rate of production, and the flow of services provided by the entire stock of the product, are all constant over time. The convenience of this long-run equilibrium assumption lies in the simple relationship it ensures between the rate of production and aggregate product services on the one hand, and between the price of the product and the price of its services on the other. These relationships allow the familiar Marshallian analysis of price and output determination under competition to be readily extended to the market for a durable good, and appear to permit a similar straightforward extension in the case of monopoly. Such simplicity nevertheless has its price. An analysis confined to situations of longrun equilibrium sheds no light on the behaviour of the industry in the short run, nor indeed on the conditions under which long-run equilibrium will be attained as a consequence of profit maximization. More seriously, by restricting their attention to positions of long-run equilibrium, those authors referred to above, who have extended Wicksell's results to the monopoly case, have been led to disregard Jevon's maxim that " in commerce, by-gones are for ever by-gones . . ."; an error which has produced the dramatic, but erroneous, conclusion that a monopolist will produce less durable assets than would perfect competitors operating under identical conditions of (constant) cost and demand. Thus one purpose of this paper is to analyse the production of durable goods, under the alternative regimes of competition and mol46poly, without imposing at the outset the assumption that the industry is in long-run equilibrium. Since the development of the industry over time depends critically on the relative importance of fixed costs, we treat the polar case, where all costs are escapable in the short run, in Part III, while fixed costs are introduced in Part V. A secondary objective is to identify, in Part IV, the error made in earlier long-run equilibrium analyses of monopoly and to show how the conclusion of Swan [7], [8], that