Price coordination can be very harmful for consumers. Yet, even if a cartel is proved to exist, and successful in enforcement, how do we estimate damages or price overcharges to consumers? We build a structural model of the Irish automobile market that avails of a crosssection of new cars and jointly estimate demand and cost primitives. We use these estimates to quantify the role that price coo...

We investigate the relationship between pay, supervision and employee sharing. Our results suggest an inverse relationship between supervision and pay across both sharing and non-sharing firms, although the trade-off is somewhat assuaged within the former. This would appear to contradict instrumental efficiency wage considerations, but could be rationalised within a gift-exchange context. In te...

We investigate the role of incentives set by a parent firm for competition among its subsidiaries. In a Cournot experiment four subsidiaries of the same parent operate in the same market. Parents earn a specific share of the joint profit and can choose how to distribute the remaining surplus (or loss). Results show that parents allocating profits equally among their subsidiaries reach outcomes ...

Instrumental efficiency wage models predict an inverse relationship between wages and supervision with this relationship becoming more pronounced amongst firms that participate in some form of employee sharing. To be sure, our theoretical exposition predicts that an increase in total remuneration will elicit a larger cut in optimal monitoring in ‘sharing’ rather than ‘non sharing’ firms. In thi...

Some studies suggest that fishery yields can be higher with reserves than under conventional management. However, the economic performance of fisheries depends on economic profit, not fish yield. The predictions of higher yields with reserves rely on intensive fishing pressures between reserves; the exorbitant costs of harvesting low-density populations erode profits. We incorporated this effec...

A small printing company in Johannesburg has experienced a steady decline in profits over the past four years, and wishes to reverse this trend. The objective of this study was to assess the implementation of Lean Manufacturing in that context, and to determine the impact it had on the printing company’s profit margin. A process-mapping of the printing organization was performed; this process-m...

Most bank efficiency studies that use stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) employ each bank’s own implicit input price when estimating efficient frontiers. But the theoretical foundation of most studies is a cost minimisation and/ or profit maximisation problem assuming perfect input markets. At the very least, traditional input price proxies therefore contain substantial measurement error. In th...