MY SCHOLARLY CONTRIBUTIONS
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ARTICLES IN JOURNALS
A New Rationale for Not Picking Low-Hanging Fruits: the Separation of Ownership and Control (with Mabel Tidball), Environmental Modeling and Assessment (2020)
Recent attempts at explaining the energy-efficiency gap rely on considerations related to organizational and behavioral/cognitive failures. In this paper, we build on the strategic delegation literature to advance a complementary explanation. We show that strategic market interaction may encourage business owners to instill a bias against energy efficiency in managerial compensation contracts. Since managers respond to financial incentives, their decisions will reflect this bias, resulting in a lack of investment.
A reconsideration of the link between vertical externality and managerial incentives, Managerial and Decision Economics (2019)
Previous research revealed that the strategic role of delegation contracts disappears if two quantity‐setting firms outsource input production to a monopolistic supplier. I show that this role is restored if the assumption of a downstream duopoly is relaxed. Thus, delegation contracts allow downstream profit‐maximizing owners to commit their firms to a behavior that differs from their preferences. This behavior varies nonmonotonically with the number of firms in the downstream market. Corresponding deviations from profit maximization are larger if the upstream monopolist makes a price precommitment. But little to no deviation occurs if the number of firms is large.
Regulation of investments in
infrastructure: the interplay between strategy behaviors
and initial endowments (with Charles
Figuieres and Mabel Tidball), The Journal of
Public Economic Theory (2012).
This
paper explores the dynamic properties of price-based
policies in a model of competition between two jurisdictions
that invest over time in infrastructures to increase the
quality of environment, a global public good. Jurisdictions
are identical in all respects but the initial stock of
infrastructures. This is a dynamic type of heterogeneity
that disappears in the long run. Therefore, at the
steady-state, usual intuitions from static settings apply:
identical jurisdictions inefficiently under-invest, calling
for public subsidies. In the short-run, however,
counterintuitive properties are established: i) although
investments produce positive externalities, corrective
policies can take first the form of taxes before turning
into subsidies in the long-run, ii) one jurisdiction can be
temporarily taxed whereas the other is subsidized. It is
shown how these phenomena are related to initial conditions.
Efficiency Inducing Taxation in Mixed Oligopolies with Stock Pollutants: An irrelevance result (with Mabel Tidball), Economics Bulletin (2010)
The purpose of this paper is to characterize the socially optimal tax rule in a mixed oligopoly market where a i) partially privatized firm compete with several private competitors and ii) production causes social damages that accumulates over time. Our paper shows that tax rules which decentralize the socially optimal timepath of production as an open-loop or a closed-loop Nash equilibrium of the mixed oligopoly game are independent of the degree of privatization.
Investment in Tourism Market and Reputation (with Georges Zaccour), The Journal of Public Economic Theory (2009)
We consider a dynamic model of competition between tourist resorts located in a same region. Resorts behave strategically in selecting both their tourist flows and levels of investment in pollution abatement. Jointly, these decisions determine the environmental quality of the tourist product, a characteristic that the consumer is unable to observe at the time of purchase. We suppose that consumers base their purchasing decisions on the reputation of the tourist region which constitutes the state variable in the differential game. Resorts’ equilibrium strategies are characterized and compared to the strategies that would obtain if resorts’ investment decisions were delegated to a regional authority.
Tax Differentials and the Segmentation of Networks of Cooperation in Oligopoly (with Hassan Benchekroun), The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics (2007)
This note study the effects of uncoordinated environmental tax policies on firms’ incentives to form bilateral R&D collaborations. It is shown that the complete network is pair-wise stable for small differences in the taxation of environmental emissions. Larger tax differentials may induce firms to broke all their international collaborations.
Strategic Privatization and Regulation Policy in Mixed Markets (with Jean Hindriks), The Icfai Journal of Managerial Economics (2006)
We consider mixed oligopoly markets for differentiated goods where private and public firms compete either in prices or quantities. We then study the welfare effect of privatization interpreted as partial strategic delegation of the public firm to a private manager with profit concern. It is shown that partial privatization improves welfare with quantity competition when goods are substitutes, and with price competition when goods are complements. However full privatization (complete delegation to private manager) can never be optimal. It is also shown that the public firm can make more profit than the private firm in equilibrium, and that this possibility is more likely under quantity competition. Turning to market regulation policy, we find: (i) that public and private firms should be taxed the same; and (ii) that price regulation is better than quantity regulation.