Spatial Pricing with a General Cost Function; The Effects of Taxes on Imports
探讨了特定税与从价税在空间定价中的不同作用，以及关税如何像运输成本一样被生产者吸收，但具体吸收方式取决于关税类型。
One of the authors of this paper referred some years ago, in a somewhat different context, to a maxim in the that the maxim in question will not be permanently mislaid [Greenhut and Ohta (1976) p. 267]. Much the same hope can be expressed with respect to one of our objectives in this paper. It is a familiar principle in microeconomics that specific (or unit) taxes act somewhat differently from ad valorem taxes although we would suggest that the full extent of this difference has not been investigated. There is also the suggestion in international trade theory that tariff barriers, and by implication local sales taxes, operate very much like transport costs and so can be analyzed like transport costs; in particular, just as we might expect spatial price discrimination through freight absorption, so we can expect spatial price discrimination through tariff (or sales tax) absorption. What is not made clear is that there is a potential conflict between these two accepted wisdoms, determined by whether the tariff or sales tax is specific or ad valorem. We examine this conflict in some detail in this paper. We shall show that just as the profit maximizing producer can be expected to absorb some proportion of transport costs, so we can also expect him to absorb some proportion of the tariffs (or taxes) to which his goods are subject. But, the precise nature of tariff absorption depends crucially on the particular tariff barriers that exist. Only specific tariffs impact the same way as do transport costs. Ad valorem tariffs will be shown to have a very different effect; they will appear, at least in part, as a change in convexity of the individual demand function. A related objective of the paper, and one with which we shall deal first in the analysis, is to show how an optimal spatial pricing rule can be derived when marginal production costs take a general form. The analysis of spatial competition and of spatial price discrimination has relied quite heavily on the assumption of constant marginal production costs. It follows naturally from this assumption that the price/quantity decisions applicable to a market at location i are independent of the price/quantity decisions at location j. The optimal discrimination pricing policy over a series of distinct markets under conditions of constant marginal production costs would be the one that maximizes profit at each market point. What happens when this assumption is relaxed? Consider the simple example