产量-价格策略下的双寡头动态多维博弈

根据动态多维博弈理论,讨论了两个企业对具有一定替代性的两种产品的完全信息动态产量-价格二维博弈模型及其均衡,证明了两个企业关于无替代性的两种产品的产量-价格动态单独博弈模型是这种二维博弈模型的特例,并得到两个企业对每一种产品进行单独博弈的均衡策略劣于联合对两种产品进行二维博弈的均衡策略。结论表明,当两个企业对处于市场未饱和的一种产品产量策略和与其具有一定替代性的处于市场饱和的另一种产品价格策略同时进行二维博弈时,要充分考虑它们之间替代性,这样选择的产量和价格策略才是最优策略。     

先后次序的施塔贝格竞争均衡与纳什均衡的比较

具有产品差异的两企业,在仅进行一轮的产品定价策略博弈中,先后次序的施塔贝格竞争均衡与纳什均衡的结果是企业双方都具有较高的均衡价格和正的均衡利润.在伯川德-施塔贝格市场竞争均衡下,追随企业具有后发制人的优势,能获得比领先企业更高的利润,并且两企业的利润都高于伯川德-纳什均衡利润.但在多轮博弈的模型中伯川德-施塔贝格均衡点并不稳定,最终会趋向于伯川德-纳什均衡点.     

信息不对称条件下双寡头市场中质量差异化产品虚假信息问题研究

基于博弈论和契约理论,研究了信息不对称条件下双寡头市场质量差异化产品定价过程中虚假信息的问题。消费者与企业关于产品质量信息存在严重不对称,为企业使用虚假质量信息提高企业利润提供了较大的空间。为分析企业使用虚假信息的问题,本文基于Bertrand博弈模型构建了双寡头市场质量差异化产品定价模型并求解企业利润。求解结果表明双寡头市场的纳什博弈均衡解为两企业均使用虚假信息,在此基础上进一步从契约的角度对企业使用虚假信息的问题进行了合理规避。最后运用算例分析验证了模型的正确性。     

不对称双寡头企业技术创新投资决策研究

许多研究技术创新投资决策的期权博弈文献忽视了企业之间的投资成本和经营成本的不对称性,本文研究成本不对称双寡头企业技术创新投资决策问题。首先,导出企业投资收益函数和投资临界值。接着对存在的三种均衡,即抢占均衡、序列均衡和同时投资均衡进行了分析讨论,结果表明,成本不对称程度较小和先动优势不大情况下,企业将同时投资;当先动优势较大的情况下,低成本企业将先投资成为领先者;当企业成本不对称程度很大时,企业将序列执行投资期权。最后,结合案例进行数值计算,验证了理论分析结果。     

内生时机下多阶段R&D博弈的均衡行动顺序

基于内生时机的博弈理论,研究了内生的R&D时机下双寡头企业先进行R&D活动后进行产品市场价格竞争的多阶段动态博弈的均衡R&D顺序,其中产品市场上的需求函数是线性的且企业在产品市场上的行动是同时进行的。运用逆向归纳法研究表明均衡R&D顺序只由企业的R&D外溢水平决定：若两企业的外溢水平都较低（较高）,则均衡R&D顺序为两企业同时行动（分别以两企业为领头者的序贯行动）;若一个企业的外溢水平较低而另一企业的外溢水平较高,则均衡R&D顺序为以低外溢水平的企业为领头者的序贯行动。在序贯R&D时两企业的R&D总水平、社会总福利水平及产品市场产量（价格）都高于（低于）同时R&D时的情形。     

企业专利投资的期权博弈研究——基于不对称双寡头模型的分析

将期权博弈引入到企业专利投资研究中来,基于期权博弈的理论,通过建立不对称双寡头模型来考察两家企业专利投资的最优决策行为,具体研究了两家企业在专利投资方面期权博弈的情况和纳什均衡,并利用数值分析说明纳什均衡的状态,研究结果表明企业在进行专利投资时必须同时考虑不确定性、不可逆性与竞争性的影响,不仅要考虑管理柔性的价值,还要考虑不同市场结构导致的竞争性所带来的战略价值,在这样一个整体框架中去寻找最优的专利投资策略。     

考虑厂商承诺行为的产品延伸服务市场竞争分析

本文研究了信息不对称下厂商承诺行为对产品延伸服务市场结构与厂商博弈均衡的影响。通过建立寡头厂商的价格博弈模型,分析了无承诺,单边承诺和双边承诺三种市场中厂商的Bertrand-Nash均衡定价与相应的利润水平和市场占有率,并进一步探究了厂商行为发生的特点和条件以及对于市场结构和消费者福利的影响关系。研究表明:(1)厂商承诺行为影响信息不对称市场的厂商价格博弈均衡;(2)厂商承诺行为主要取决于产品延伸服务水平的阈值区间和消费者对产品延伸服务的偏好差异程度;(3)市场上的优势厂商总是承诺的先行者,并且会努力选择最大的产品延伸服务水平;(4)厂商承诺有助于提升服务水平,提升消费者剩余。     

竞争环境下的以旧换新策略

企业通过对拥有旧产品的老消费者提供以旧换新补贴能够提升自身销量与利润。然而,面临竞争对手时企业的以旧换新决策是否会受到影响?本文求解了先后进入市场的双寡头竞争企业所面临的以旧换新与定价博弈均衡,并分析了竞争存在与否对于企业以旧换新策略产生的影响。研究结果表明,第一,面对竞争时企业的定价决策受到市场中老消费者比例、两家竞争企业各自新产品的创新提升水平、老产品的使用残值这四个因素的共同影响。第二,当老产品残值相对较低而市场中老消费者数量适中时,两企业均不提供以旧换新可能成为博弈均衡,而其他条件下,两企业均提供以旧换新为博弈均衡。第三,先进入的企业没有动机单独为消费者提供以旧换新补贴。第四,竞争对手的存在对于先进入企业自身的以旧换新决策与相应的定价策略都产生了显著的影响。     

市场规模、范围经济与供应链聚集可能性

将供应链聚集看作多客户外包的结果,建立一个两客户"自制-外包"决策博弈模型,即两个企业各自独立做出是否将生产外包给一个拥有相同生产技术但存在范围经济的承包商.对均衡每件的分析表明,当范围经济程度与市场规模的比值达到一定程度时,两客户均做出外包决策是一个纳什均衡,从而多客户集体外包(供应链聚集)成为可能.当这一比值进一步增大,供应链聚集下的产品市场价格要低于厂商各自独立进行生产时的产品市场价格.由于可能存在巨额内部交易成本,使得三者一体化不是一个必然的最优结果.这些结果一方面给出了供应链聚集的一个替代原因,另一方面也可用来解释"中国价格"这一广泛观察到的现象.     

消费者多方购买行为与企业R&D策略博弈分析

通过构建完全信息博弈模型,研究具有网络外部性的产品市场中,在存在消费者多方购买行为时企业的研发策略和创新动机,并深入分析多方购买者比例大小和网络外部性强度对企业研发投资水平的影响。在市场中存在多方购买行为时均衡结果表明:(i)企业有动机进行研发投资;(ii)研发企业均衡价格、需求以及利润均高于不研发企业;(iii)在差异度系数和投资系数都充分大时研发企业最优研发投入随着多方购买者比例的增加而增大。最后通过具体算例分析知道:在考虑多方购买条件下,市场中存在研发时消费者总剩余和社会总福利高于市场中不存在研发时的情形。     

The Timing of Capacity Investment with Lead Times: When Do Firms Act in Unison?

We study competitive capacity investment for the emergence of a new market. Firms may invest either in capacity leading demand or in capacity lagging demand at different costs. We show how the lead time and other operational factors including volume flexibility, existing capacity, and demand uncertainty impact equilibrium outcomes. Our results indicate that a type of bandwagon behavior is the most likely equilibrium outcome: if both firms are going to invest, then they are most likely to act in unison. Contrary to much received wisdom, we show that leader–follower behavior is very uncommon in equilibrium where firms do not have volume flexibility, and will not occur at all if lead times are sufficiently short. On the other hand, if there is volume flexibility in production, then the likelihood of this sequential investment behavior increases. Our findings underscore the importance of operational characteristics in determining the competitive dynamics of capacity investment timing.     

Centralized versus Decentralized Competition for Price and Lead‐Time Sensitive Demand

We study two firms that compete on price and lead‐time decisions in a common market. We explore the impact of decentralizing these decisions, as made by the marketing and production departments, respectively, with either marketing or production as the leader. We compare scenarios in which none, one, or both of the firms are decentralized to see whether decentralization can be the equilibrium strategy. We find that under intense price competition, with intensity characterized by the underlying parameters of market demand, firms may suffer from a decentralized structure, particularly under high flexibility induced by high capacity, where revenue‐based sales incentives motivate sales/marketing to make aggressive price cuts that often erode profit margins. In contrast, under intense lead‐time competition, a decentralized strategy with marketing as the leader can not only result in significantly higher profits, but also be the equilibrium strategy. Moreover, decentralization may no longer lead to lower prices or longer lead‐times if the production department chooses capacity along with lead‐time.      

Competitive markdown timing for perishable and substitutable products

We model as a duopoly two firms selling their fixed stocks of two substitutable items over a selling season. Each firm starts with an initial price, and has the option to decrease the price once. The problem for each firm is to determine when to mark its price down in to maximize its revenue. We show that the existence and characterization of a pure-strategy equilibrium depend on the magnitude of the increase in the revenue rate of a firm when its competitor runs out of stock. When the increase is smaller than the change in the revenue rate of the price leader when both firms are in stock for all of the three possible scenarios, neither firm has the incentive to force its rival to run out of stock and if a firm marks its price down after the season starts, its inventory runs out precisely at the end of the season. When the increase is larger than the change of the price leader׳s revenue rate in one particular scenario, waiting until its rival runs out of inventory may be an equilibrium strategy for the larger firm even though this may lead to leftover inventory for itself. In other cases, there may be no pure-strategy equilibrium in the game. In certain regions of the parameter space, a firm׳s revenue may be decreasing in its starting inventory which shows that a firm may be better off if it can credibly salvage a portion of its inventory prior to the game. While most of our analysis is for open-loop strategies, in the final part of the paper, we show that the open-loop equilibrium survives as an equilibrium when we consider closed-loop strategies for an important subset of the parameter space.     

Committed Versus Contingent Pricing Under Competition

Should capacitated firms set prices responsively to uncertain market conditions in a competitive environment? We study a duopoly selling differentiated substitutable products with fixed capacities under demand uncertainty, where firms can either commit to a fixed price ex ante, or elect to price contingently ex post, e.g., to charge high prices in booming markets, and low prices in slack markets. Interestingly, we analytically show that even for completely symmetric model primitives, asymmetric equilibria of strategic pricing decisions may arise, in which one firm commits statically and the other firm prices contingently; in this case, there also exists a unique mixed strategy equilibrium. Such equilibrium behavior tends to emerge, when capacity is ampler, and products are less differentiated or demand uncertainty is lower. With asymmetric fixed capacities, if demand uncertainty is low, a unique asymmetric equilibrium emerges, in which the firm with more capacity chooses committed pricing and the firm with less capacity chooses contingent pricing. We identify two countervailing profit effects of contingent pricing under competition: gains from responsively charging high price under high demand, and losses from intensified price competition under low demand. It is the latter detrimental effect that may prevent both firms from choosing a contingent pricing strategy in equilibrium. We show that the insights remain valid when capacity decisions are endogenized. We caution that responsive price changes under aggressive competition of less differentiated products can result in profit‐killing discounting.     

Buying used products for remanufacturing: negotiating or posted pricing

Product reclamation is a critical process in remanufacturing. It is generally assumed in the literature that customers simply want to get rid of their used products without expecting any compensation for them. Some authors have only recently started looking into firms that offer a posted (fixed) price for them. Following recent reports suggesting that customers are increasingly open to bargaining, we compare using a posted price and bargaining to obtain used products. In our analysis, we consider an original manufacturer acting as a monopolist as well as a manufacturer and an independent remanufacturer acting in a duopoly. We analytically show that bargaining is always beneficial to the monopoly manufacturer. In the duopoly case, we distinguish a Cournot competition and a market with the manufacturer as Stackelberg leader. The results of a numerical study show that both firms will use posted pricing in the Cournot competition, especially if bargaining is not costless. By contrast, the remanufacturer can significantly increase his profit by using negotiations if he is the Stackelberg follower.     

Transformational leadership and follower creativity: The mediating role of follower relational identification and the moderating role of leader creativity expectations

We examined follower relational identification with the leader as a mediator and follower perceptions of leader creativity expectations as a moderator in the relationship between transformational leadership and follower creativity. Using a sample of 420 leader–follower dyads from an energy company in mainland China, we found that follower relational identification with the leader mediates the transformational leadership–follower creativity relationship, and this mediating relationship is conditional on the moderator variable of follower perceptions of leader creativity expectations for the path from follower relational identification to follower creativity. These results contribute to the literature by clarifying why (through relational identification) and when (high creativity expectations set by the leader) transformational leadership is positively related to follower creativity.     

Transfer of risk in the newsvendor model with discrete demand

In this paper we consider the transfer of risk in a newsvendor model with discrete demand. We view the newsvendor model as a leader/follower problem where the manufacturer (leader) decides the wholesale price and the retailer (follower) decides the quantity ordered. Taking a Pareto-optimal contract as a starting point, the manufacturer wishes to design a real option contract to enhance profits. A new real option contract is said to be feasible if both parties' expected profit is at least as great as in the original contract. When demand is discrete, there are usually infinite feasible contracts that yield maximum expected profits to the manufacturer. In the paper we show that either all, some or none of these real option contracts offer an improved position for the retailer.     

A bilevel programming problem with maximization of a supermodular function in the lower level

In bilevel programming there are two decision makers, the leader and the follower, who act in a hierarchy. In this paper we deal with a bilevel problem where the follower maximizes a supermodular function. The payoff for the leader is given by the weighted set that is chosen by the follower. To increase his payoff the leader can increase the supermodular function of the follower by a modular one, thus influencing the follower’s decision, but he has to pay a penalty for this. We want to find an optimum strategy for the leader. This is a bilevel programming problem with continuous variables in the upper level and a parametric supermodular maximization problem in the lower level. We analyze the structure of the bilevel problem. This we use to provide an equivalent one-level combinatorial problem. Finally, we investigate the properties of the new problem.     

Optimality conditions for a bilevel matroid problem

In bilevel programming there are two decision makers, the leader and the follower, who act in a hierarchy. In this paper we deal with a weighted matroid problem where each of the decision makers has a different set of weights. The independent set of the matroid that is chosen by the follower determines the payoff to both the leader and the follower according to their different weights. The leader can increase his payoff by changing the weights of the follower, thus influencing the follower’s decision, but he has to pay a penalty for this. We want to find an optimum strategy for the leader. This is a bilevel programming problem with continuous variables in the upper level and a parametric weighted matroid problem in the lower level. We analyze the structure of the lower level problem. We use this structure to develop local optimality criteria for the bilevel problem that can be verified in polynomial time.     

The Newsvendor Problem and Price‐Only Contract When Bankruptcy Costs Exist

We study a supply chain of a supplier selling via a wholesale price contract to a financially constrained retailer who faces stochastic demand. The retailer might need to borrow money from a bank to execute his order. The bank offers a fairly priced loan for relevant risks. Failure of loan repayment leads to a costly bankruptcy (fixed administrative costs, costs proportional to sales, and a depressed collateral value). We identify the retailer's optimal order quantity as a function of the wholesale price and his total wealth (working capital and collateral). The analysis of the supplier's optimal wholesale price problem as a Stackelberg game, with the supplier the leader and the retailer the follower, leads to unique equilibrium solutions in wholesale price and order quantity, with the equilibrium order quantity smaller than the traditional newsvendor one. Furthermore, in the presence of the retailer's bankruptcy risks, increases in the retailer's wealth lead to increased supplier's wholesale prices, but without the retailer's bankruptcy risks the supplier's wholesale prices stay the same or decrease in retailer's wealth.