Collaborative Research: Studies of Property Rights and Merger Policy

该奖项资助两个不同项目的工作。 科斯定理指出，产权的分配与经济结果无关;只要受决策影响的所有各方都能进行有效的谈判，产权的分配就无关紧要。 虽然这是一个合理的基准，但经济学家们早就认识到，在许多情况下，这种讨价还价是不可能的。 第一个项目集中在一个原因：由于信息不对称导致的低效率谈判。 简而言之，当谈判是不完美的，因为当事人没有相同的信息，当事人的现状立场可能会影响最终达成的协议。 本研究旨在分析在这种情况下，如何分配产权以实现经济福利最大化。 该项目扩大了以前的结果，通过调查的问题，如第二最好的财产权的性质时，效率无法实现，选择拥有简单的财产权的好处，替代谈判程序的影响，并在动态设置的最佳财产权。 这可能会提高我们对各种问题的理解，如知识产权的最佳分配，法律中责任规则与财产规则的好处，分配频谱的替代方法的效率，以及生产伙伴关系的组织。 该项目的智力价值在于，它寻求扩大我们对产权的适当分配如何通过促进贸易来提高效率的理解。 更广泛的影响是，财产权的分配在许多实际的经济活动中起着重要的作用。第二个项目审查了最佳横向合并政策的性质，反垄断政策的核心支柱之一。 该项目的特点是一个最佳的动态合并政策的设置与随机到达合并的可能性和事先不确定的协同作用水平，其中公司决定每个时期的合并，提出反垄断机构。 它确定的条件下，这个困难的问题有一个惊人的简单的解决方案：一个反托拉斯当局谁想要最大限度地提高消费者福利可以实现这一目标，通过使用一个完全短视的合并审查政策，也就是说，一个批准今天的合并，当且仅当它deos不降低消费者剩余给定当前的市场结构。 这个项目的新工作包括放宽一个重要的假设，即参与一个可能的合并的公司不与任何其他可能的合并重叠。 该项目的更广泛影响包括制定更知情的反托拉斯政策。

This award funds work on two distinct projects. The Cose Theorem instructs that the allocation of property rights is irrelevant for economic outcomes; as long as all parties affected by a decision can engage in efficient bargaining, the allocation of property rights will not matter. While a sueful benchmark, economists have long recognized that in many circumstances such bargaining is not possible. The first project focuses on one reason: inefficient bargaining due to asymmetric information. Put simply, when bargaining is imperfect because the parties do not have the same information, the status quo position of the parties may matter for the final agreements reached. This research works to analyse how property rights should be be distribued to maximize economic welfare under these circumstances. The project expands on previous results by investigating issues such as the nature of second best property rights when efficiency cannot be achieved, the benefits of options-to-own over simple property rights, the effects of alternative bargaining procedures, and optimal property rights in dynamic settings. This would may improve our understanding of issues as diverse as the optimal assignment of of intellectual property rights, the benefits of liability rules versus property rules in law, the efficienciy of alternative mthods of allocating spectrum, and the organization of productive partnerships. The intellectual merit of the project is that it seeks to expand our understanding of how the proper allocation of property rights can increase effciency by facilitating trade. The broader impacts are that the allocation of property rights plays an important role in numerous practical economic progblems.The second project examines the nature of an optimal horizontal merger policy, one fo the central pillars of antitrust policy. The project characterizes an optimal dynamic merger policy in a setting with stochastically arriving merger possibilities and ex ante uncertain levels of synergies in which the firms decide each period which mergers to propose to the antitrust authoirty. It identifies conditions in which this difficult issue has a strikingly simple resolution: an antitrust authority who wants to maximize consumer welfare can accomplish the objective by using a completely myopic merger review policy; that is, one that approves a merger today if and only if it deos not lower consumer surplus given the current market structure. New work on this project includes the relaxation of an important assumption, that the set of firms involved in one possible merger does not overlap with those in any other possible mergers. The broader impacts of this project include developing better-informed antitrust policies.