We analyze a successive vertical oligopoly model that incorporates vertical relationships between industries and demonstrate that free entry in an industry that produces a homogeneous product can lead to a socially insufficient number of firms. This is in contrast with the previous findings that, under Cournot oligopoly with fixed set-up costs, level of entry in the free-entry equilibrium is socially excessive. It has often been argued that this result can provide a justification for apparently anticompetitive entry regulations. Our finding yields an important policy implication that such a justification is not necessarily valid when vertical relationships are taken into account.
A crucial personnel decision employers face is whether to fill a limited number of managerial positions with internal hires or external recruits. We present a theoretical and empirical analysis of this decision and how it relates to wage setting and the provision of general training. The theoretical framework is a promotion tournament involving M competing firms with heterogeneous productivities, two-level job hierarchies, and a fixed number of managerial positions. Employers provide general training to their workers, some of whom are promoted internally or raided by competing firms. We also consider an alternative model based on variation in the quality of the worker-employer match. Both models predict the following results: As the number of workers at the lower level of the hierarchy increases, holding fixed the number of managers at the top, 1) internal promotion increases relative to external recruitment, 2) employers provide more general training, 3) the percentage of employees in the upper tail of the wage distribution decreases, 4) profitability increases. We test these predictions using data from the 2004 wave of the WERS, a nationally-representative cross section of British establishments. The empirical results are supportive and contribute to the literature some new stylized facts concerning how key employer decisions vary with both the size and shape of the organizational hierarchy.
This paper focuses on the stylized differences in work organizations and labour market practices between the United States and Japan concerning multi-skilling, delegation, continuous process improvement, human capital accumulation and labour turnover. It presents a model that addresses interconnections among three key features of work organizations (multi-skilling, delegation and continuous process improvement), and examines ways in which they are related to labour market practices. It analyses strategic interactions among firms concerning their choices of work organization, and shows that strategic complementarity arising from labour market externality can yield the multiplicity of equilibria that provides a systematic explanation for the differences.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.