Theoretical and Practical Analyzes on Resale Price Maintenance

转售价格维持现象通常发生在厂商具有一定垄断力的情况下。反垄断法禁止这种行为，但某些商品除外。当制造商对零售商和/或批发商行使其政治权力时，他们通常根据合同向零售商和/或批发商提供利润。如果制造商可以通过给予利润率的方式将零售价格分配给零售商，那么转售价格维持就相当于纵向一体化。然而，当零售商如大超市如戴尔，也有垄断权力，有一个问题，连续垄断。过去关于维持转售价格的论点没有充分考虑地点或地理的重要性。我们明确地介绍了市场的地理分布，并调查了制造商和超级市场的行为。我们发现，存在一个唯一的均衡，超市和零售商赞助的制造商共存。我们还将分销成本引入到我们的框架中，并得出了理论结果，即只有当市场规模的增加降低了分销成本时，制造商才会在不同的区域选择不同的价格。我们选取了三个行业来检验这一假设：汽车业、医药业和图书业。我们发现汽车业和医药业都有保持转售价格的动机。另一方面，我们不能拒绝分销成本与市场规模无关的原假设。通过比较零售商在不同地区自由定价的情况，我们发现当制造商在不同地区保持转售价格时，消费者的福利会受到损失。

The phenomena of resale price maintenance are usually observed where manufacturers possess some monopolistic power. The anti-trust law prohibits this kind of conduct except certain commodities. When manufacturers exercise their monoppolistic power on retailers and/or wholesalers, they usually provide margins to them under contract. If manufacturers can assign the retail price to retailers by giving margins, then the resale price maintenance is equivalent to vertical integration. However, when retailers such as big super-marker like Daier, also have monopolistic power, there is a problem of consecutive monopoly. In the past the arguments on resale price maintenance do not fully consider the importance of location or geography. We explicitly introduce geographic distribution of the markets and investigate the behaviors of both manufacturers and super-market. We found that there exists a unique equilibrium where both super-market and retailers sponcered by manufacturers coexist. We also introduce distribution cost into our framework and derived the theoretical result that manufacturers prefer resale price maintenance to different prices in different teritories only when an increase in the size of the markets reduces their distribution cost. We picked up three industriees to test this hypothesis ; automobile industry, medicine industry, and book industry. We found thet both automobile and medicine industries have incentive to keep resale price. On the other hand, we can not reject the null hypothesis that distribution cost is independent from the market size. We sldo found that whenever manufacturers keep the resale price over different area, consumers suffer welfare loss, in the comparison in the case of free pricing in each area by retailers.