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...

This research presents a retail shelf-space decision model that incorporates a nonlinear profit function, vertical and horizontal location effects, and product cross-elasticity. We propose a linear programming formulation of the nonlinear profit function that can solve the shelf-space problem optimally. We describe potential advances in heuristic and meta-heuristic algorithms and compare the ap...

Our aim is to maximize expected profit per item of a multi-stage production system by determining best adjustment points of the equipments used based on technical product specifications defined by designer. In this system, the quality characteristics of items produced should be within lower and higher tolerance limits. When a quality characteristic of an item either falls beneath the lower li...

The aim of this preliminary draft paper is to identify a framework for studying demand in hierarchical networks. A specific choice of technical conditions are given for precisely formulating four equivalent well-known ways to specify the demand of a buyer: by a demand function, an inverse demand function, a valuation function, or a demand set. Unimodality (or quasi-concavity) of profit is a bas...

This study has developed a production inventory model where the cycle timeis fuzzy, the existence of defective products is assumed in each batch andproduct screening is performed both in-production and after-production.Triangular fuzzy numbers serve to model uncertainties in the cycle time, anda fuzzified total inventory profit function is created by thedefuzzifica...