Market Power in a Non-Malleable City
扩展了Markusen和Scheffman的城市土地模型，引入不可分割、不可塑的住房，分析大地主如何通过囤地、低密度开发、延迟重建或空置等手段影响城市租金和边界。
In a recent paper, Markusen and Scheffman (1978) (M & S) have examined the effects of ownership concentration in urban land markets on the equilibrium land use pattern in a circular city. At the heart of their approach is the observation that (a) the natural upper bound on the supply of land within any fixed distance x from the CBD constitutes an effective barrier to entry, and therefore, (b) a who owns a significant proportion of land at x has market power to the extent that he can affect the rent profile for the city by withholding some or all of his land. In particular M & S show that the existence of a landowner in the above sense may imply the existence of vacant land at points inside the city boundary as the withholds some of his land in order to force up rents and make a higher profit on the land which he does not leave vacant. The city analysed by M & S is the familiar circular one with all employment in the CBD and all residents located in a sequence of concentric dormitory suburbs. In particular housing is assumed perfectly malleable and divisible (or, equivalently, M & S are looking at cities which are instantaneously built from nothing to their present form). It has been demonstrated by the author in Vousden (1980) that such an approach to urban housing cannot be assumed to provide a valid description of a city even in the long run. In addition it prevents us from looking at a range of interesting real-world urban phenomena such as demolition of older housing. This paper extends the M & S model to allow for non-malleable, indivisible housing. The general framework is a simplified version of that employed in Vousden (1980). As in that paper and in M & S, developers and households will be assumed to hold static price expectations. The general outline of the paper is as follows. Section 1 presents those basic elements of the model which are common to a competitive city and a city with a large landowner. Section 2 summarizes the properties of a non-malleable competitive city. Section 3 presents the problem faced by a profit maximizing large (LL) and compares the competitive city of Section 2 with a city containing a single LL as well as a large number of competitive developers (CD's).' The broad spirit of M & S' results are shown to carry over here. In particular, it is shown that the large will act in a way which pushes up the rent profile for the city and thereby increases the radius of the city.2 However LL has a widei range of devices for bringing about an upward shift in the rent function than is the case in [M & S]. In the malleable model his choice is between supplying the same output of housing services as CD's at a given location or simply withholding land from the market. In our model he can affect urban rents by (a) withholding vacant land (as in M & S); (b) supplying housing of a lower density than CD's at a given location; (c) delaying upward redevelopment at a particular location longer than CD's; (d) leaving existing structures unoccupied (abandonment). In particular M & S' result that LL will withhold land near the city boundary carries over