An attractive feature of competitive markets is that they maximize the sum of consumer and producer surplus. Producer and consumer surplus are shown in the market supply and market demand diagram in Figure 7-4. Recall that the producer surplus for all producers is the area above the supply curve and below the market price line, and that the consumer surplus for all consumers is the area below t...

In the presence of switching costs, firms are often interested in expanding current market shares to exploit their customer base in the future. However, if the product is sold by retailers, manufacturers may face the problem of extracting too much surplus from the retailer. If this happens, then the latter has not an incentive to build a subscriber base. This paper would like to connect two unr...

This paper investigates advertising level, pricing and production quantity decision problems in a supply chain when demand and production cost disruptions occur simultaneously. The supply chain consists of one manufacturer and one retailer where customer demand depends on the retail price and advertisement expenditure. The authors examine this problem in two game-theoretic models: a cooperative...

The labor surplus economy model has as its basic premise the inability of unskilled agricultural labor markets to clear in countries with high man/land ratios. In such situations, the marginal product of labor is likely to fall below a bargaining wage, related to the average rather than the marginal product. The reallocation of such disguisedly unemployed workers by means of “balanced” intersec...

This paper demonstrates that the economic surplus which agents produce in bilateral interactions is extractable by an outside party having sufficient initial resources. The third party achieves this outcome using a class of ‘‘exclusive-interaction’’ contracts. A basic extractability result is shown to be robust to several extensions: competition among outside parties, multiplicity of interactin...

In many services markets such as consulting, auto-repair, financial planning and healthcare, the service provider may have more information about the customer’s problem than the customer, and different customers may impose different costs on the service provider. In principle, the service provider should ethically care about the customer’s welfare, but it is possible that a provider may maximiz...