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on Industrial Organization |
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Issue of 2018‒08‒13
three papers chosen by |
| By: | Michael Webb; Nick Short; Nicholas Bloom; Josh Lerner |
| Abstract: | Patenting in software, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence has grown rapidly in recent years. Such patents are acquired primarily by large US technology firms such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and HP, as well as by Japanese multinationals such as Sony, Canon, and Fujitsu. Chinese patenting in the US is small but growing rapidly, and world-leading for drone technology. Patenting in machine learning has seen exponential growth since 2010, although patenting in neural networks saw a strong burst of activity in the 1990s that has only recently been surpassed. In all technological fields, the number of patents per inventor has declined near-monotonically, except for large increases in inventor productivity in software and semiconductors in the late 1990s. In most high-tech fields, Japan is the only country outside the US with significant US patenting activity; however, whereas Japan played an important role in the burst of neural network patenting in the 1990s, it has not been involved in the current acceleration. Comparing the periods 1970-89 and 2000-15, patenting in the current period has been primarily by entrant assignees, with the exception of neural networks. |
| JEL: | L86 O34 |
| Date: | 2018–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:24793&r=ind |
| By: | Jorge Florez-Acosta (Universidad del Rosario - Universidad Nacional de Rosario [Santa Fe]); Daniel Herrera-Araujo (PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS Paris - École normale supérieure - Paris - INRA - Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École des Ponts ParisTech - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, PSE - Paris School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper empirically examines the effects of product delisting on consumer shopping behavior in a context of grocery retailing by large multiproduct supermarket chains. A product is said to be delisted when a supermarket stops supplying it while it continuous being sold by competing stores. We develop a model of demand in which consumers can purchase multiple products in the same period. Consumers have heterogeneous shopping patterns: some find it optimal to concentrate purchases at a single store while others prefer sourcing several separate supermarkets. We account for this heterogeneity by introducing shopping costs, which are transaction costs of dealing with suppliers. Using scanner data on grocery purchases by French households in 2005, we estimate the parameters of the model and retrieve the distribution of shopping costs. We find a total shopping cost per store sourced of 1.79 € on average. When we simulate the delisting of a product by one supermarket, we find that customers'probability of sourcing that store decreases while the probability of sourcing competing stores increases. The reduction in demand is considerably larger when consumers have strong preferences for the delisted brand. This suggests that retailers may be hurting themselves, and not only manufacturers, when they delist a product. However, when customers have strong preferences for the store such effects are lower, suggesting that inducing store loyalty in customers appears to have an effect on vertical negotiations and, in particular, it enables powerful retailers to impose vertical restraints on manufacturers. |
| Keywords: | Grocery retailing, supermarket chains, buyer power, vertical,restraints, product delisting, shopping costs, one-and multistop shopping,Simulated Maximum likelihood |
| Date: | 2017–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:wpaper:halshs-01518146&r=ind |
| By: | Pedro Carvalho |
| Abstract: | This paper presents empirical evidence on the impact of competition on firm productivity for the Portuguese economy. To that effect, firm-level panel data comprising information between 2010 and 2015 gathered from the Integrated Business Accounts System (Portuguese acronym: SCIE) is used. The database enables the construction of economic and financial indicators, which allow for isolating the impact of competition on firm-level productivity. We find a positive relationship between competition and both total factor productivity and labor productivity. This relationship is found to be robust to different specifications and in accordance with the results in the literature obtained for other countries. |
| Keywords: | Competition, Productivity, Portugal |
| JEL: | D40 D24 O47 |
| Date: | 2018–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mde:wpaper:00108&r=ind |