The model of perfect competition is one of the most famous, most important, and most misunderstood concepts in economics. Rather than aiming to be a full-blown model of real-world competitive markets, the perfect competition model isolates the decentralized coordination mechanism inherent in all...

We consider a large rational expectations economy built on Han and Yang (2013) where traders can share information with each other via an information network and investigate the impact of network connectedness on market equilibrium outcomes. We find that in the equilibrium with endogenous...

Perfectly competitive market is often used in economics textbook as an idealized model for understanding microeconomics issue. But, is it realisable in practice, and crucially, under what kind of scenario and condition? The answer is: perfectly competitive market does not exist in most market...

Markets, likened to an invisible hand, often appear to contradict econometric assumptions that rule out spillovers of one person's treatment on another's outcomes. This paper provides a simple statistical framework highlighting that controls are indirectly affected by the treatment through the...

The primary predictions of strategic-trade theory are not restricted to imperfectly-competitive markets. Indeed, these predictions emerge in a natural three-country extension of the traditional theory of trade policy in competitive markets, once the theory is augmented to allow for...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

This paper mainly studies two topics: linear complementarity problems for modeling electricity market equilibria and optimization under uncertainty. We consider both perfectly competitive and Nash-Cournot models of electricity markets and study their robustifications using strict robustness and...

The quality of public management is a recurrent concern in many countries. Calls to attract the economy's best and brightest managers to the public sector abound. This paper studies self-selection into managerial and non-managerial positions in the public and private sector, using a model of a...

This paper is based on the model of backward linkages from foreign direct investment (FDI) Lin/Saggi (2003), where the market structure of the final goods sector is represented by a monopoly or Cournot oligopoly, and the supplier sector - by a pure monopoly. We extend this model by examining...

This paper shows that perfectly competitive behavior can occur in individual markets that exhibit frictions of trading. I consider an environment where firms hire workers to produce an output sold in a product market. Both markets are frictional as consumers and workers have imperfect access to...

Italian Abstract: L'obiettivo di questo capitolo è il rapporto tra la funzione di costo, che stilizza le ipotesi sui rendimenti di scala, e la funzione d'offerta dell'impresa concorrenziale, singola e aggregata. Useremo la teoria microeconomica standard della produzione allo scopo di...

During the second half of the twentieth century economic theory moved increasingly away from price theory, which was gradually displaced by more modern trends such as game theory, decision theory, behavioral-empirical-experimental economics, heterodox economics, etc. This was due to serious...

We analyze the interplay between product market prices and firm boundary decisions. Enterprises are heterogeneous with respect to their productivities and each enterprise chooses between two ownership structures--centralized ownership (integration) performs well in coordinating managerial...

We investigate how price ceilings and floors affect outcomes in continuous time, double auction markets with discrete goods and multiple qualities. When price controls exist, the existence of competitive equilibria (the solution concept of classical market theory) is no longer guaranteed; hence, we...

The smartphone apps have revolutionized the markets of goods and services more than other recent technologies. Although they modified the market paradigm in sectors like accommodation, transport, or "gigs", the changes in the way the economics systems function are still widely neglected by the...

This paper develops a dynamic model of competitive equilibrium in electricity markets with thermal, hydro and intermittent power sources. Thermal generators have positive and increasing costs and use a marketable input. Hydro generators use a free and uncertain input, but one that is storable....

Competition reduces prices. But, what is not commonly known is that competition also promotes more products in the same category, leading to a diversity of makes and models that could only benefit the consumer. At the theoretical level, a perfectly competitive market creates the space for...

This paper develops a new model with heterogeneous firms under perfect competition in a Heckscher-Ohlin-Samuelson setting. We show that trade need not make selection in the comparative advantage sector stricter as suggested by earlier work. Selection is driven by the capital intensity in entry...

We study competitiveness of financial markets in a one-period model, in which traders speculate on private information and hedge endowment shocks. Developing and fully characterizing a new measure of market competitiveness, we find that market becomes perfectly competitive if and only if the...

We study the existence and uniqueness of equilibria for perfectly competitive markets in capacitated transport networks. The model under consideration is rather general so that it captures basic aspects of related models in, e.g., gas or electricity networks. We formulate the market equilibrium...

We model a network of linked permit markets to examine efficiency and dependencies between the markets in a competitive equilibrium. Links enable the participants of one emissions trading system to use the permits of another system. To improve the cost-efficiency of the international policy...

In spite of the apparent general consensus, both economic theory in abstracto and the political practice in the realm of competition are looked upon from (too) many perspectives. Far from being convergent or even complementary, the “theories” and “policies” are rather contradictory and...

Adverse selection is an important problem in many markets. Governments respond to it with complex regulations: mandates, community rating, subsidies, risk adjustment, and regulation of contract characteristics. This paper proposes a perfectly competitive model of a market with adverse selection....

Using a standard frictionless, continuous time, and continuous trading stochastic economy with heterogeneous beliefs, the purpose of this paper is to provide sufficient conditions for the existence of competitive equilibrium in an incomplete asset market. A new approach to proving existence is...

This paper develops a discussion and provides the basis for a dispute of the principal assumption on which the classical-neoclassical theory of perfect competition is based: is it indeed true that the individual product demand of each producer is perfectly elastic (horizontal) and the price is...

I analyze whether wage policies -- like minimum wages and wage subsidies -- can add value to an optimal non-linear earnings tax scheme in a perfectly competitive labour market. Jobs in the labour market differ along two margins: intensity (labour effort) and duration (labour hours). Three key...