关于“信息传递纵向约束专题讲座”的通知

主讲人：Chen Bo Associate Professor Southern Methodist University

主持人：汪淼军（经济学系教授）

时间：

1 价格传递质量信号初步                 5月30日9:30-11:30

2 价格传递质量信号拓展                 5月30日14:30-16:30

3 产业链中纵向约束初步                 6月15日9:30-11:30

4产业链中纵向约束拓展                  6月15日14:30-16:30

地点：浙大玉泉校区经济学院401室（5月30日）和340教室（6月15日）

主要内容：

 

It is well-known in traditional information economics that asymmetric information between buyers and sellers can lead to various allocation inefficiencies. In particular, asymmetric information about the quality of products can induce low transaction volumes and sometimes complete breakdown of market transactions. Recently, the economics literature has proposed several market mechanisms that can mitigate such adverse effects of asymmetric information. A particularly important mechanism of such is signaling quality through prices by firms with private information about the quality of their products. The basic rationale of the price-signaling-quality mechanism is that firms with high-quality products can separate themselves from low-quality firms by charging very high prices resulting in lower trading volumes, while firms with low-quality products charge lower prices for their products, but to more consumers. The lectures will give an introduction to the literature on the price-signaling-quality mechanism. We will specifically introduce several important economic models to discuss the possibility of signaling private quality through prices by a monopolist as well as by competing oligopolists.

 

Contracts between vertically related firms (i.e., firms at different levels of the production and distribution process) have been an important issue in the industrial organization literature as well as in competition policy. Various vertical restraints, which are contractual restrictions in agreements between firms in a vertical structure, are typically observed in such contracts. Vertical restraints can take various form, ranging from manufacturer's warranty, royalties from retailers, to resale price maintenance agreements, which set the minimum or maximum prices that retailers can charge form the manufacturer's products. In these two lectures, we shall give an introduction to vertical restraints. In particular, we shall discuss legal treatment of vertical restraints in the US and in Europe and we will also employ different economics models to discuss the rationale of various vertical restraints --- how different vertical restraints can be useful to manufacturers in different vertical structures.

 

 

 

Professor Bo Chen received his PhD from University of Wisconsin – Madison in 2007. He held a position as an Assistant Professor of Economics (2007-2014) and subsequently an Associate Professor of Economics (2014 to present) at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX. Professor Bo Chen is an applied microeconomic theorist. In his research, he attempts to provide rationales of behavior and phenomena in economically relevant situations by employing state-of-the-art theoretical techniques. His research interest lies in understanding economic agents’ incentives in dynamic interactions and market processes, as well as the effects of information asymmetry in the design of various real-world mechanisms. He has been a visiting scholar at University of Bonn (Germany), Kyoto University (Japan), Maastricht University (the Netherlands), and Singapore Management University. He has published extensively in leading academic journals, including American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Theory, Games and Economic Behavior, Journal of Mathematical Economics, International Journal of Game Theory, and Management Science. His current research projects include an investigation of the role of information structures in sequential binary coordination problems, quality signaling in a competitive environment, welfare issues in vertically related industries, as well as issues in contest design.