Die Industrieökonomik, im englischen Sprachraum als „Industrial Organization“ (IO) bezeichnet, ist ein zentrales Forschungsgebiet der modernen Volkswirtschaftslehre. Sie ist eine Teildisziplin der Mikroökonomik und befasst sich mit den Entscheidungen und Verhaltensweisen von Unternehmen, der Organisation und Struktur von Industrien sowie der Funktionsweise von spezifischen Märkten. Im Zentrum des Interesses stehen speziell Verhaltensweisen und Märkte, die mit dem Modell der vollkommenen Konkurrenz nur unzureichend beschrieben werden können. Solche Märkte sind insbesondere gekennzeichnet durch eine geringe Anzahl von Anbietern, heterogene Produkte mit differenzierten Preisen, komplizierte vertikale Strukturen auf der Angebotsseite (mehrstufige Produktion und Distribution) sowie hohe Aufwendungen fir Werbung und Forschung und Entwicklung (F and E). Um die Funktionsweise solcher Märkte zu verstehen, analysiert die theoretische Industrieökonomik das strategische Verhalten von Unternehmen mit Hilfe von verschiedenen Modellen der oligopolistischen Konkurrenz Das dominierende Analyseinstrument ist dabei die Spieltheorie, zu deren Entwicklung die Industrieökonomik im Gegenzug wichtige Beiträge geleistet hat.
This paper studies the effect of trade facilitation on vertical firm structure using plant-level data from Switzerland. Based on the Business Census and the Input-Output table, we first calculate a binary measure of vertical integration for all plants registered in Switzerland. We then estimate the effect of a Mutual Recognition Agreement with the European Union on the plants' probability of being vertically integrated. Adopting a difference-in-differences approach, we find that this policy change reduced the treated plants' probability of being vertically integrated by about 10 percent. Our results are consistent with recent work in international trade theory.
We study private communication between jury members who have to decide
between two policies in a majority vote. While interests of all agents are perfectly aligned, only some agents ("experts") receive a private noisy signal about which policy is correct. Each expert can, but need not, recommend a policy to her audience of "non-experts" prior to the vote. We show theoretically and empirically that communication can undermine (informational) efficiency of the vote and hence reduce welfare. Both efficiency and stability of communication hinge on the structure of the communication network. If some experts have distinctly larger audiences than others, non-experts should not follow their voting recommendation. We test the model in a lab experiment and find supporting evidence for this effect and, more generally, for the
importance of the network structure.
Although both betweenness and closeness centrality are claimed to be important for the effectiveness of someone's network position, it has not been comprehensively studied which networks emerge if actors strive to optimize their centrality in the network in terms of betweenness and closeness. We study each of these centrality measures separately, but we also analyze what happens if actors value betweenness and closeness simultaneously. Network dynamics differ considerably in a scenario with either betweenness or closeness incentives compared with a scenario in which closeness and betweenness incentives are combined. There are not only more stable networks if actors' betweenness and closeness are combined, but also these stable networks are less stylized.
We characterize the outcome of majority voting for single-peaked preferences
on median spaces. This large class of preferences covers a variety of multidimensional policy spaces including products of lines (e.g. grids), trees, and hypercubes. Our main result is the following: If a Condorcet winner (i.e. a winner in pairwise majority voting) exists, then it coincides with the appropriately defined median ("the median voter"). This result generalizes previous findings which are either restricted to a one-dimensional policy space or to the assumption that any two voters with the same preference peak must have identical preferences. The result applies to models of spatial competition between two political candidates. A bridge to the graph-theoretic literature is built.
