The quality of corporate governance is influential to operating efficiency of a public firm and thereby affects the government's privatization policies. Within a mixed duopoly market, this paper considers corporatization and related corporate governance improving in economic sense to show that the effects of public firm's governance enhancement can be extracted out from the effects of privatization. More importantly, the optimal privatization policy should be a flexible instrument hinging on the extent of governance improvement. Scenarios with a less efficient or an equally efficient public firm are considered and the result holds in both scenarios. Hence policy implications apply.

We show that cost asymmetry between the domestic and foreign firms is not necessary for the occurrence of insufficient entry in the domestic country. This result provides a rationale for pro-competitive domestic policies even in the absence of cost asymmetries among the domestic and foreign firms. However, if significant demand comes from foreign countries, and the market structures are determined endogenously in the domestic and foreign countries, domestic-entry in an open economy might not be insufficient, implying that foreign competition might not reduce the importance of anti-competitive domestic policies.

We show the effects of cooperation among the labour unions with complementary workers on innovation, consumer surplus and welfare. Although cooperation among the unions reduces wage, it may either increase or decrease the firm's incentive for innovation, and may also make the consumers and the society worse off by reducing innovation. While cooperation (compared to non-cooperation) among the unions makes the workers better off, it may not make all final goods producers better off. (JEL: D43; J51; L13; O31)

We consider final goods producers’ preference for horizontal product differentiation in the presence of strategic input price determination. Final goods producers may not prefer maximal differentiation but may prefer moderate differentiation under both Cournot and Bertrand competition in the final goods market if product differentiation does not increase the market size significantly and there is either free entry in the input market or the input supplier has increasing returns to scale technology. Thus, we provide a new rationale for moderate product differentiation. Our reasons are different from the existing reasons of mixed pricing strategy, endogenous leadership, no-buy option for the consumers and the relative performance incentive schemes.

No abstract