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International audience; An important yet largely unexamined issue is how the interaction between deforestation and pollution affects economic and environmental sustainability.This article seeks to bridge the gap by introducing a dynamic model of pollution accumulation where polluting emissions can be mitigated and the absorption efficiency of pollution sinks can be restored. We assume that emissions are due to a production activity, and we include deforestation both as an additional source of emissions and as a cause of the exhaustion of environmental absorption efficiency. To account for the fact that the switching of natural sinks to a pollution source can be either possible, and in such a case even reversible, or impossible, we consider that restoration efforts can be either independent from or dependent on environmental absorption efficiency, i.e., state-independent versus state-dependent restoration efforts. We determine (i) whether production or deforestation is the most detrimental from environmental and social welfare perspectives, and (ii) how state-dependent restoration process affects pollution accumulation and deforestation policies and the related environmental and social welfare consequences.

False quality claims have recently rocked the automobile industry. To promote customer demand while seemingly complying with regulations, manufacturers may cheat even at the risk of incurring sever...

Recent empirical studies indicate that improvements in product conformance quality exhibit learning-by-doing patterns. We address quality improvement in a competitive duopoly market for partially substitutable products characterized by levels of quality that are not necessarily identical. The products’ quality is described with a hazard rate that can be improved both by accumulating production experience (autonomous learning) and quality improvement efforts (induced learning). Given that defective items are fully reimbursable and the demands exhibit increasing returns to scale, we derive Nash equilibrium pricing and induced learning effort dynamic policies. We show that when the effectiveness of autonomous learning prevails over the effectiveness of efforts in induced learning, equilibrium prices gradually grow over time; the trend is quite the opposite when autonomous learning is less effective than induced learning.

We explore the economic and environmental impacts of market structures (competition or integration at vertical and horizontal levels). We consider a bilateral duopoly consisting of two manufacturers and two retailers in which each manufacturer offers a wholesale price contract to the respective retailer. The manufacturers decide on wholesale prices and abatement efforts concerning pollution emissions related to manufacturing processes, whereas the retailers compete in quantities in the consumer market. To understand the comprehensive effects of market structures on economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability, we examine a measure of eco‐friendly social welfare, which is the ratio of social welfare and environmental pollution. Interestingly, we find that the market structures that have been believed to be more efficient are less efficient from a broader perspective: (1) double marginalization can generate higher eco‐friendly social welfare, and (2) horizontal competition between firms can result in lower eco‐friendly social welfare. Although vertical integration and horizontal competition yield greater social welfare by facilitating more production activities, these market structures often fail to induce sufficient abatement efforts to balance the polluting effect of the large volume, resulting in more significant environmental degradation. We also show that, despite the pollution‐curbing effect, higher emission penalties can result in less eco‐friendly social welfare. They can even curtail the abatement efforts of firms under particular circumstances. When products become more substitutable, the eco‐friendly social welfare can decrease depending upon the market structure.

This research investigates the impact of both horizontal and vertical competition, on the one hand, and strategy types (commitment-based versus contingent-based equilibrium strategies), on the other hand, on the pollution accumulated by two supply chains over time. We consider a two-stage game model where two manufacturers and two retailers are involved in a wholesale price contract, in order to supply the demand over a finite time horizon. In the first stage of the game, the manufacturers set their respective optimal transfer prices. During the second stage, polluting emissions are created over time in proportion with demand, which is controlled by the retailers’ respective consumer prices. In this stage, the manufacturers are involved in emissions abatement. In this setup, we seek to identify the combination of market structure and strategy type that leads the two supply chains to generate the lowest pollution intensity and the highest level of abatement intensity.

In this paper, an extension of the Bass model is suggested that accounts for the influence of conformance quality on mixed (i.e., positive and negative) word-of-mouth in the diffusion of a new product. A primary goal is to determine how an active operational policy seeking to continuously improve conformance quality affects the optimal leveraging of marketing instruments used to diffuse new products, and the resulting sales and profits. To do so, an optimal tradeoff by a monopolistic firm between advertising effort and price, on the one hand, and conformance quality, on the other hand, is analyzed, along with the implications for word of mouth effectiveness. Our results can be summarized as follows. Price and advertising levels are respectively lower and higher under an operations–marketing policy than under a marketing policy only. As a result, the market potential and the innovation effect are higher under an operations–marketing policy than under a marketing policy only, as is the imitation effect due to conformance quality improvements over time. Also, greater cumulative sales and cumulative profits are obtained. However, higher design quality results in a lower price and greater advertising effort under an operations–marketing policy than under a marketing policy only. Finally, for lower design quality, the two policies result in different patterns (non-monotonic vs. monotonic) for price and advertising yet cumulative sales and profits are of quite similar magnitude.

This paper investigates how current and future generations are affected by commitment-based Nash equilibrium environmental strategies when the environmental absorption efficiency is susceptible to switch from a pollution sink to a source. We formulate a two-player differential game model of transboundary pollution that includes the environmental absorption efficiency as a state variable that can be enhanced thanks to restoration efforts. Based on a logarithmic specification for the instantaneous revenue function, we characterize the cooperative solution and the commitment-based Nash equilibrium strategy, and examine their differences in terms of steady state and transient behavior. We notably show that a commitment-based Nash equilibrium strategy makes it possible to prevent a definitive switching of the environmental absorption efficiency from a pollution sink to a source but imposes greater economic sacrifices on current generations than on future generations. In comparison, the cooperative solution imposes greater sacrifices on current generations in terms of revenues but it imposes lower environmental costs on both current and future generations than commitment-based Nash equilibrium strategy.

It has been shown that learning-by-doing enables firms to reduce marginal production costs, but that this effect weakens due to organizational forgetting. In order to assess the impact of both learning and forgetting on long-term competitiveness and a firm’s profitability, we model an experience accumulation process with depreciation and consider two competing firms that produce fully substitutable products. In this model, unit production costs decrease with the firm’s experience due to the proprietary learning process as well as the spillover of experience from the competing firm. Firms can either share or hide from each other their information about the state of their respective experience throughout the game. We found that in an equilibrium steady state, if the organizational forgetting is sufficiently large (larger than the spillover rate value), then information sharing, compared to information hiding, results both in less competitiveness and increased profits for firms. Conversely, if the organizational forgetting is small and the spillover opportunities are relatively large, then information sharing promotes both long term competitiveness and firm profits. Accordingly, firms are better off in the long term by deliberately limiting (expanding) their experience accumulation process whenever organizational forgetting is relatively large (small). A high ability of proprietary learning, however, can interfere in this relationship so that limiting the firms’ experience process will always be compatible with higher profitability.

The primary issue in this paper is to determine whether mobility restrictions or securing social interactions is most effective in countering an epidemic disease that spreads also via asymptomatic transmission. We develop an optimal control policy model wherein i) treatment capabilities are endogenous, ii) the social loss due to disease-related deaths is part of the tradeoff in terms of health and social welfare perspectives, iii) the policymaker's inability to counter the disease gives rise to growing popular discontent over time, and iv) non-therapeutic intervention policy engenders social fatigue over time. We also allow for partial immunity upon recovery. In many ways, our model applies to the recent pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus. In this setup, we identify which non-therapeutic policy option between mobility restrictions or securing social interactions most effectively minimizes both the impact of policymaker’s inability and the ensuing popular discontent and social fatigue.

Autonomous 'word of mouth', as a channel of social influence that is out of firms' direct control, has acquired particular importance with the development of the Internet. Depending on whether a given product or service is a good or a bad deal, this can significantly contribute to commercial success or failure. Yet the existing dynamic models of sales in marketing still assume that the influence of word of mouth on sales is at best advertising-dependent. This omission can produce ineffective management and therefore misleading marketing policies. This paper seeks to bridge the gap by introducing a contagion sales model of a monopolist firm's product where sales are affected by advertising-dependent as well as autonomous word of mouth. We assume that the firm's attraction rate of new customers is determined by the degree at which the current sales price is advantageous or not compared with the current customers' reservation price. A primary goal of the paper is to determine the optimal sales price and advertising effort. We show that, despite costly price adjustments, the interactions between sales price, advertising-dependent and autonomous word of mouth can result in complex dynamic pricing policies involving history-dependence or limit cycling consisting of alternating attraction of new customers and attrition of current customers. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

"Learning by doing", in which unit production costs decrease with cumulative production experience, is extensively observed in economies of scale. It has been shown that, in the case of mature technologies, learning curves exhibit a linear behavior in cumulative production. In this paper we consider two competing firms that produce fully substitutable products and whose experience levels have a linear effect on their unit production costs. We assume that production experience is affected by random causes, and that the learning process may involve spillovers of experience from the competing firm. As in the Cournot competition, in this differential game the firms compete by choosing the quantities of products that they will produce. In contrast to the Cournot assumption, according to which firms maximize their profits by taking as given the quantity produced by the competitor, we assume that a firm may not be able to determine its competitor's reaction to a change in its output and instead may conjecture the competitor's response. We find that, in contrast to the case of a steady state, an open-loop equilibrium over a finite planning horizon may result in greater output (more competitive behavior) compared with a subgame-perfect equilibrium. We show that this result is due to the fact that strategic behavior in feedback Nash equilibrium depends on the relationship between the level of proprietary learning by doing (which encourages strategic complementarity) and the level of spillovers (which involves strategic substitutability).

The objective of this chapter is to study how wholesale price and revenue sharing contracts affect operations and marketing decisions in a supply chain under different dynamic informational structures.We suggest a differential game model of a supply chain consisting of a manufacturer and a single retailer that agree on the contract parameters at the outset of the game. The model includes key operational and marketing activities related to a single product in the supply chain. The manufacturer sets a production rate and the rate of advertising efforts while the retailer chooses a purchase rate and the consumer price. The state of the game is summarized in the firms' backlogs and the manufacturer's advertising goodwill. Depending on whether the supply chain members have and share state information, they may either make decisions contingent on the current state of the game (feedback Nash strategy), or precommit to a plan of action during the whole game (open-loop Nash strategy). Given a contract type, the impact of the availability of information regarding the state of the game on the firms' decisions and payoffs is investigated. It is shown that double marginalization can be better mitigated if the supply chain members adopt a contingent strategy under a wholesale price contract and a commitment strategy under a revenue sharing contract.

We consider a stock pollution problem where the biosphere can transform from a sink to a source of pollution in the presence of self-regenerating environmental absorption efficiency. We examine the problem of controlling pollution and the capacity of the biosphere to absorb pollution: the regulator can mitigate emissions and can invest to build-up the absorption capacity of pollution sinks. We examine conditions under which both measures, mitigation and absorption capacity investments, are substitute (complement) to each other, and the relative extent to which environmental self-regenerating capabilities affect these conditions. We also exhibit the possibility of an oscillatory approach to the steady state. Particular attention is paid to the situation where the social planner is impatient.

The paper investigates the extent to which capacity investment considerations interact with the double marginalization effect in a simple supply chain governed by a wholesale price contract. To do so, a non-cooperative differential game model is formulated to study the pricing and capacity investment decisions in a supply chain, which consists of a supplier and a manufacturer. In such a game, there are different decision rules—open-loop, closed-loop, feedback—that are available to the supply chain participants, depending on the observability of the current state of the supply chain. While closed-loop and feedback equilibrium strategies involve the observability of other chain member’s production capacity, open-loop equilibrium strategies do not have such requirement. We examine how the supplier and the manufacturer determine, with the different decision rules, their production capacities and pricing policies to maximize their profits over an infinite planning horizon, and determine how the observability of other supply chain’s members’ production capacity affects the magnitude of the double marginalization effect. Our study suggests that the observability of other chain member’s current production capacity entails a lower production efficiency that results in a greater double marginalization effect. This allows us to conclude that observability of other chain member’s current production capacity is associated with a greater double marginalization effect.

Some areas of science face the problem that many academics prefer the private sector over academia. This negatively affects the quality and the quantity of the research output as well as the availability of competent lecturers in these areas. The present paper investigates by means of an optimal control model how the reward of competencies in research and teaching in the private sector affects investments into these skills as well as the decision on whether and when to optimally leave academia. As the decision between academia and industry is obvious if a scientist has strong preference for either, we focus on scenarios where this is not the case. We notably show that the dynamic trade-off between academia and industry results in various forms of brain drain. In this regard, we first confirm that if academic competencies are well rewarded in the private sector, the most competent academics will leave academia. Further, we find scenarios where a scholar with intermediate competencies will try to improve his or her skills as much as possible before leaving academia and scenarios in which it is optimal to not put much effort into work and let competencies slowly depreciate before leaving. Even if scientists are highly skilled and motivated to stay, if poor working conditions do not support knowledge acquisition, competencies will inevitably fall and academia will consist solely of mediocre scholars. The results suggest that brain drain can be destructive for academia in the long run.

We consider an industry consisting of a large number of firms producing substitutable products and engaged in a dynamic Cournot-type competition. The firms are able to reduce their marginal production costs by accumulating their own experience as well as the experience spillovers from other firms. In particular, firms accumulate production experience through proprietary learning, which, however, depreciates over time. We determine steady-state Nash equilibrium policies that are based on the assumption that the firms do not have precise information about each competitor and therefore are unable to respond to a specific firm’s dynamics. The firms, however, do react to overall industry trends. We show that in such a case, though the information used for production control is incomplete, in the long run the firms tend to the output they would converge to under complete information. We also find that industry growth due to more firms entering the market results in decreasing long-run equilibrium output of each firm when the depreciation of experience is higher than the rate of spillovers. Otherwise, the opposite result can emerge, i.e., the steady-state output will grow.

We investigate how the relationship between economic growth and pollution is affected by the source of pollution: production or consumption. We are interested in polluting waste that cannot be naturally absorbed, but for which recycling efforts aim to avoid massive pollution accumulation with harmful consequences in the long run. We distinguish the cases where recycling efforts are capital-improving or capital-neutral. Based on both environmental and social welfare perspectives, we determine how the interaction between growth and polluting waste accumulation is affected by the source of pollution, i.e., either consumption or production, and by the fact that recycling may or may not act as an income generator, i.e., either capital-improving or capital-neutral recycling efforts. Several new results are extracted regarding optimal recycling policy and the Environmental Kuznets Curve. Beside the latter concern, we show both analytically and numerically that the optimal control of waste through recycling allows to reaching larger (resp., lower) consumption and capital stock levels under consumption-based waste compared to production-based waste while the latter permits to reach lower stocks of waste through lower recycling efforts.

One of the main priorities of companies involved in supply chains is improving the quality of their products. However, as in other parts of supply chain management, decentralized decision-making in supply quality management is prevalent, which causes inefficiencies such as the well-known double marginalization phenomenon. Coordinating schemes, such as the revenue sharing contract, can contribute to mitigating this phenomenon. In this paper, we investigate the potential coordinating power of the revenue sharing contract in a supply chain with one manufacturer and one supplier that collaborate to improve the design quality of a particular finished product. We set the cooperative outcome as a benchmark and compare the efficiency of an optimal revenue sharing contract with an optimal wholesale price contract in improving design quality in the setup of a non-cooperative two-stage game.

This paper analyzes the consequences of allowing for punishment in a real-effort pair production experiment. The behavior of the best performer in the team differs on whether he or she can impose a sanction on the less performing partner. When sanctions are not allowed, good performers reduce their effort in response to the advantageous difference in scores; when they can impose sanctions, their change in effort is no longer related to the difference in scores. To some extent, a sanction mechanism allows good performers to focus on their own performance. In the case of costless sanctions, not sanctioning a partner who under-performs, what we refer to as forgiveness, prompts the latter to improve his or her performance, but applying the sanction has a stronger push effect. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We consider a simple two-echelon supply chain composed of a manufacturer and a retailer in which the demand process of the retailer is an AR(1) where the random component is a function of both sides’ information. We focus on partial information sharing under which each side informs the other of an interval in which the exact value of its own component of demand lies. These various levels of information sharing can reduce the supply chain costs.

This paper analyzes how faculty members dynamically allocate their efforts between improving their research and teaching skills, taking into account the organizational structures and incentives implemented by academic institutions. The model builds on the assumption that organizational structures have an impact on the nature of spillover effects between teaching and research competencies. We analyze the dynamic equilibrium under unilateral and bilateral spillovers, using the no-spillover case as a benchmark. The bilateral spillover case is the most appealing as it achieves the highest overall performance; however, the nature of the equilibrium and the career paths can be quite different depending on the parameters of the problem such as the obsolescence of competencies or the strength of the spillover effect. This finding provides interesting insights on what could be the most productive configuration of a higher education institution.

This paper investigates the research and development accumulation and pricing strategies of two firms competing for consumer demand in a dynamic framework. A firm's research and development is production-cost-reducing and can benefit from part of the competitor's research and development stock without payment. We consider decisions in a game characterized by Nash equilibrium. In this dynamic game, a player's action depends on whether the competitor's current research and development stock are observable. If the competitor's current research and development stock are not observable or observable only after a certain time lag, a player's action can be solely based on the information on the current period t (open-loop strategy). In the converse case, it can also include the information on the competitor's reaction to a change in the current value of the state vector (closed-loop strategy), which allows for strategic interaction to take place throughout the game. Given the cumulative nature of research and development activities, a primary goal of this paper is to determine whether, regardless of the observability of the competitor's current research and development stock, free research and development spillovers generate a lower level of scientific knowledge than research and development appropriability. A second objective of the paper is to determine how the observability of the rival's current research and development stock affects a firm's research and development and pricing decisions and payoffs under imperfect research and development appropriability.

In the literature on marketing models, the assumption of mixed word-of-mouth has been limited to the Bass diffusion model. Yet explicit leveraging of the originating factors of such assumption is lacking. Apart from that example, mixed word-of-mouth has been disregarded in contagion sales models. This paper bridges the gap by suggesting a sales model, where both positive and negative word-of-mouth affect the attraction rate of new customers, along with advertising. The difference between positive and negative word-of-mouth is based on the distinction between satisfied and dissatisfied current customers, which is supposed to depend on conformance quality. A primary issue in this paper is to determine how a firm should determine the optimal intertemporal trade-off between investing in advertising-dependent word-of-mouth and quality-dependent word-of-mouth. To address this issue, a contagion sales model is suggested where mixed autonomous word-of-mouth alone can lead to either commercial success or failure of a given brand.

The paper considers a dynamic game with a single manufacturer who supplies two retailers. The manufacturer determines his production rate of a specific product, the rate of quality improvement efforts as well as the rate of advertising for the product. Each retailer controls her purchasing rate and the consumer sales price. Payments from a retailer to the manufacturer are determined by a wholesale price or a revenue-sharing scheme. The retailers operate in the same consumer market in which they compete in prices for the consumer demand. Nash equilibrium conditions are derived and numerical methods are employed to characterize equilibrium behavior of the players in a differential game of fixed and finite duration.