Price-Cost Margins in Producer Goods Industries and "The Importance of Being Unimportant"
研究生产者商品行业的价格成本加成是否受其产出在客户行业成本中重要性的影响，发现两者负相关，尤其在高度集中行业中更显著。
N this paper I investigate proposition that price-cost margin of a producer goods industry will vary systematically with what I call industry's importance of its output in costs of its industrial customers. The empirical results indicate that price-cost margins are indeed negatively associated with cost-importance, particularly in highly concentrated industries. In these industries at least, evidence seems to confirm the importance of being unimportant. In section I, I present relationship between derived demand elasticity for an industry's output and cost-importance of its output, and also analyze ways in which industry pricing coordination and transaction costs of changing input suppliers interact with cost-importance to influence industry price-cost margins. In sections II and III I describe process of sample selection and a method for calculating a measure of cost-importance for producer goods industries. In section IV I present empirical results of estimating relation between price-cost margins and cost-importance for a broad sample of producer goods industries, and in section V I summarize my findings and suggest some promising avenues for future research.