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1. Ten Facts on Declining Business Dynamism and Lessons from Endogenous Growth Theory

   https://doi.org/10.1257/mac.20180449  

   Akcigit, Ufuk ; Ates, Sina T. ( January 2021 , American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics)

   null (Ed.)

   In this paper, we review the literature on declining business dynamism and its implications in the United States and propose a unifying theory to analyze the symptoms and the potential causes of this decline. We first highlight 10 pronounced stylized facts related to declining business dynamism documented in the literature and discuss some of the existing attempts to explain them. We then describe a theoretical framework of endogenous markups, innovation, and competition that can potentially speak to all of these facts jointly. We next explore some theoretical predictions of this framework, which are shaped by two interacting forces: a composition effect that determines the market concentration and an incentive effect that determines how firms respond to a given concentration in the economy. The results highlight that a decline in knowledge diffusion between frontier and laggard firms could be a significant driver of empirical trends observed in the data. This study emphasizes the potential of growth theory for the analysis of factors behind declining business dynamism and the need for further investigation in this direction. (JEL D33, E25, J24, L13, O33, O34) 

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2. Imperfect Competition, Compensating Differentials, and Rent Sharing in the US Labor Market

   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20190790  

   Lamadon, Thibaut ; Mogstad, Magne ; Setzler, Bradley ( January 2022 , American Economic Review)

   We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business and worker tax records for the period 2001–2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over nonwage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing. (JEL D24, H24, H25, J22, J24, J31, J42) 

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3. Rating systems and increased heterogeneity in firm performance: Evidence from the New York City Restaurant Industry, 1994–2013

   https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3545  

   Greenberg, Jason ; Sands, Daniel B. ; Cattani, Gino ; Porac, Joseph ( August 2023 , Strategic Management Journal)

   We investigate the extent to which the increasing availability of ratings information has affected heterogeneity in firm performance and, if so, what market segments are responsible for these changes. A unique dataset was constructed with restricted‐access government data to examine these questions in the context of the New York City restaurant industry between 1994 and 2013. We find that firms serving tourist and expensive price point market segments experienced increasing sales discrepancies as a function of rating differentials when ratings information became more easily accessible with the advent of online rating platforms. These findings depict how the prevalence of online rating systems have shaped competition and value capture, thus providing insight into the determinants of firm performance heterogeneity.

   We examine the extent to which increasing availability of ratings information has affected firm performance by estimating changes in comparative sales between New York City restaurants between 1994 and 2013. Analyses indicate that increased access to ratings information during this period had a considerable effect on comparative sales for firms serving the tourist and the expensive price point market segments. These results provide insights into other industries where access to evaluations and rating systems have also increased. This work suggests that online ratings have affected how firms compete and capture value, and managers have opportunities to use rating systems to their advantage.

    

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4. Distribution-level markets under high renewable energy penetration

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3538637.3538846  

   Ju, Peizhong ; Lin, Xiaojun ; Huang, Jianwei ( June 2022 , Thirteenth ACM International Conference on Future Energy Systems (ACM e-Energy 2022))

   We study the market structure for emerging distribution-level energy markets with high renewable energy penetration. Renewable generation is known to be uncertain and has a close-to-zero marginal cost. In this paper, we use solar energy as an example of such zero-marginal-cost resources for our focused study. We first show that, under high penetration of solar generation, the classical real-time market mechanism can either exhibit significant price-volatility (when each firm is not allowed to vary the supply quantity), or induce price-fixing (when each firm is allowed to vary the supply quantity), the latter of which leads to extreme unfairness of surplus division. To overcome these issues, we propose a new rental-market mechanism that trades the usage-right of solar panels instead of real-time solar energy. We show that the rental market produces a stable and unique price (therefore eliminating price-volatility), maintains positive surplus for both consumers and firms (therefore eliminating price-fixing), and achieves the same social welfare as the traditional real-time market. A key insight is that rental markets turn uncertainty of renewable generation from a detrimental factor (that leads to price-volatility in real-time markets) to a beneficial factor (that increases demand elasticity and contributes to the desirable rental-market outcomes). 

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5. Robust Auctions for Revenue via Enhanced Competition

   https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2019.1929  

   Roughgarden, Tim ; Talgam-Cohen, Inbal ; Yan, Qiqi ( July 2020 , Operations Research)

   Most results in revenue-maximizing mechanism design hinge on “getting the price right”—selling goods to bidders at prices low enough to encourage a sale but high enough to garner nontrivial revenue. This approach is difficult to implement when the seller has little or no a priori information about bidder valuations or when the setting is sufficiently complex, such as matching markets with heterogeneous goods. In this paper, we apply a robust approach to designing auctions for revenue. Instead of relying on prior knowledge regarding bidder valuations, we “let the market do the work” and let prices emerge from competition for scarce goods. We analyze the revenue guarantees of one of the simplest imaginable implementations of this idea: first, we enhance competition in the market by increasing demand (or alternatively, by limiting supply), and second, we run a standard second price (Vickrey) auction. In their renowned work from 1996 , Bulow and Klemperer [Bulow J, Klemperer P (1996) Auctions vs. negotiations. Amer. Econom. Rev. 86(1):180–194.] apply this method to markets with single goods. As our main result, we give the first application beyond single-parameter settings, proving that, simultaneously for many valuation distributions, this method achieves expected revenue at least as good as the optimal revenue in the original market. Our robust and simple approach provides a handle on the elusive optimal revenue in multiitem matching markets and shows when the use of welfare-maximizing Vickrey auctions is justified, even if revenue is a priority. By establishing quantitative tradeoffs, our work provides guidelines for a seller in choosing among two different revenue-extracting strategies: sophisticated pricing based on market research or advertising to draw additional bidders. 

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