Estimating Price—Cost Markups Under Nonlinear Pricing Competition
利用1984-1988年美国早期蜂窝电话行业的季度数据，从非线性定价竞争均衡模型中识别边际成本，估计价格成本加成，发现双寡头下边际成本降低导致加成上升，且低端用户面临更高加成，竞争带来的效率提升更多惠及高端用户。
This paper provides a structural interpretation to the estimates of the shape and position of nonlinear tariffs. We focus on the evaluation of price—cost margins, and thus we need to identify marginal cost from an equilibrium model of nonlinear pricing competition. We estimate these price—cost margins using quarterly data from the early U.S. cellular telephone industry between 1984 and 1988. Our results indicate that the margins are increased under duopoly, due to a significant reduction in marginal costs. Moreover, we find that the price—cost margins vary over the consumption levels and that low end users are subject to higher price—cost margins than high-end users. The impact of competition further increases the margins in the low-end user segment, relative to high-end users. In that sense the benefits of competition, which are largely due to increased efficiencies, are passed on relatively more to high-end users. We also show that these findings are robust even if one includes a number of observable market demand and cost variables.